404 CLAUDE FULLER. 



There are several classes of mounds. The first of these is 

 the juvenile mound^ obviously the domicile of a young colony. 

 These nests appear as collections of clay amidst a tussock of 

 :grass. From this stage the nest develops into a small 

 domed domicile with the soil about the periphery of the 

 mound perforated in every direction by a mesh of galleries, 

 much like those of the hive itself. From this second stage 

 develop the larger mounds. Around the large and old 

 mounds the network of galleries is absent, but replaced by 

 .radiating trunk routes to feeding grounds awaj' from the 

 nest. The remaining class is the mound built up by a colony 

 after having been expelled by bilobatus, or by the destruc- 

 tion of the mound, when it is frequently erected on the same 

 site or hard by. Under such circumstances a supplementary 

 mound may be formed. These mounds are built quite 

 rapidly ; in one instance, where a series of small nests was 

 exposed for queens, it was found that those colonies, in which 

 the queen had escaped detection, had, a week later, built 

 mounds equal in size to those which the}^ were previously in 

 occupation of. 



Owing to the difficulty in detecting queens in large nests 

 it was thought for some time that a queen did not inhabit 

 every mound, but this point was kindly cleared up for me 

 by Mr. Leonard Bagshawe-Smith, of Platrand, Transvaal, 

 upon whose farm the investigation, to be detailed below, 

 into the connections between the mounds was carried out. 

 Writing to this point under date of August 25th, Mr. 

 Bagsh;iwe-Smith sa.ys : " Yesterday, I took out fourteen nests. 

 In thirteen I found queens, and in the fourteenth, a fairly big 

 mound, I found a king. In one I found both king and queen. 

 If you dig the big mounds out very quickly you find the 

 queen; if you take time you will not. The queen gets away 

 very quickly ; with a quick movement she slides and falls 

 from gallery to gallery and gets below soil level. I had a 

 good opportunity of watching one sliding and falling, with a 

 crowd of workers after her." Again, under date of Septem- 

 ber 2nd, he writes: "I took queens from each of six nests 



