184 Journal New York Entomological Society. [Voi. xvn. 



and southern United States has been passing under the name of M. 

 minutuni var. minimum Buckley. What attracted my attention to 

 these nests was the great number of extremely small, jet-black 

 workers running up and down the grass-blades around the entrances. 

 On closer examination I found that the ants were celebrating what 

 corresponds to the nuptial flight in other species. Among the workers 

 were numbers of females, running up and down the grass-blades and 

 still issuing from the galleries, but all of these females were wing- 

 less. They moved about in great excitement behaving exactly like 

 the winged females of other ants on such occasions, but being unable 

 to fly, they finally crawled down to the ground and wandered away 

 from the nests, often accompanied for a short distance by the excited 

 workers. There were no males to be seen either outside or inside 

 the nests. Throughout the morning I kept finding the wingless 

 females in all parts of the field, running about singly and evidently 

 seeking for places in which to found their formicaries. 



Examination of all the females I could capture- — several dozens in 

 number- — showed that they were truly apterous. Their thoraces were 

 narrow and, though queen-like in the structure of their sclerites, 

 showed not the slightest evidence of ever having borne wings. These 

 females were, in fact, precisely like the females of the tropical M. 

 floricola Jerdon and M. carbonarium F. Smith subsp. ebcninum Forel 

 described in my paper on the ants of the Bahamas.* This peculiar 

 condition and the complete absence of males at the time of the abor- 

 tive but unmistakable marriage-flight (sit vcnia vcrho) described 

 above, suggested the following questions : Were the ergatoid and 

 apterous females so abundantly produced in each colony fecundated in 

 the parental nest some weeks previously by their own brothers? Or 

 can it be that males are very rarely or never produced by this species, 

 and that the females lay unfertilized eggs capable of developing into 

 workers or females? Or are there two generations of females, one 

 winged and produced earlier in the summer at a time when males 

 also appear, and a later ergatoid and parthenogenetic generation 

 which perform a necessarily abortive marriage-flight in the latter 

 part of August? It is easy to formulate these and other questions, 

 but they are to be answered only by some resident entomologist who 

 can devote special study to this little insect. 



* The Ants of the Bahamas, Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., XXI, 1905, pp. 

 87-89, Figs. D and E. 



