432 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1960 



If a colony loses its king or queen, or both, supplementary re- 

 productives are produced within a short time to take their places. 

 AVlien the new royalty is established, the production of supplementals 

 ceases, and the surplus secondaries are eaten by the workers. Ap- 

 parently the presence of a pair of functional reproductives exerts 

 some inhibiting influence throughout the colony that prevents the 

 development of unnecessary secondary reproductives. Liischer ( 1952) 

 found that the inhibitory effect is potent only when the workers 

 can in some way touch the functional reproductives. He proposes 

 therefore that it is the saliva, feces, or exudates of the latter that 

 contain some ingredient, possibly an ectohormone, that is the ac- 

 tive inhibiting agent. This suggestion is quite in line with the re- 

 cent finding that a "queen substance" obtained by honey bee workers 

 from their queen inhibits the development of the ovaries in the work- 

 ers and prevents the rearing of new queens. It seems a strange co- 

 incidence, then, that insects so far apart as the termites and honey 

 bees should have developed the same device for regulating the activi- 

 ties of the colony. 



THE ANTS 



On a warm spring day swarms of winged ants may be seen flutter- 

 ing through the air. These are mature males and females on their 

 nuptial flight, durmg which mating takes place. A female after 

 being fertilized descends to the earth, breaks off her wings, looks 

 for a hole in a protected place, or herself digs a small cavity in 

 the ground. She then closes the hole over her and remains a self- 

 imposed prisoner until the eggs develop in her ovaries. During 

 this time she is nourished on the products of her own degenerating 

 wing muscles dissolved in her blood. When the ripened eggs are 

 laid and hatch, this issuing first brood of young larvae are fed saliva 

 by the queen until they transform to pupae. The first adults that 

 come from these underfed larvae are necessarily small ; they are sterile 

 wingless forms destined to become workers, which are the ordinary 

 ants seen about an anthill. They go out of the nest foraging for food 

 for themselves and their mother. The latter then lays more eggs which 

 produce later broods of better fed larvae that give rise to larger 

 adults. The queen continues with her egg laying and the colony 

 grows rapidly as the workers enlarge the nest. Eventually there will 

 be thousands of active workers in the colony. The workers of some 

 species may be of several sizes, the largest being known as soldiers. 

 The next spring winged fully adult males and females appear, ready 

 to disperse and found new colonies. 



Caste determination in the ants is still not fully understood. So 

 many explanations have been offered to explain it that we cannot 

 feel safe at present in accepting any one as final. 



