54 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



towards the Great Nore, a distance of five or six 

 miles. The column appeared to be in breadth eight 

 or ten feet, and in height about six inches, which I 

 suppose must have been from their resting- one upon 

 another." 



These ants were winged — whence this immense co- 

 lumn came was not ascertained. From the numbers 

 here agglomerated, one would think that all the ant- 

 hills of the counties of Kent and Surrey could scarcely 

 have furnished a sufficient number of males and females 

 to form it. 



When Colonel Sir Augustus Frazer, of the Horse 

 Artillery, was surveying on the 6th of October 1813 

 the scene of the battle of the Pyrenees from the sum- 

 mit of the mountain called Pena de Aya, or Les Quatre 

 Couronnes, he and his friends were enveloped by a 

 swarm of ants, so numerous as entirely to intercept 

 their view, so that they were glad to remove to another 

 station, in order to get rid of them. 



The females that escape from the injury of the ele- 

 ments and their various enemies, become the founders 

 of new colonies, doing all the w ork, as I have related 

 in a former letter, that is usually done by the neuters^. 

 M. P. Huber has found incipient colonies, in which 

 w^ere only a few workers, engaged with their mother 

 in the care of a small number of larvae ; and M. Perrot, 

 his friend, once discovered a small nest, occupied by a 

 solitary female, who was attending upon four pupte 



* RI. Huber observes that fecundated female?, after tliey have lost 

 Iheir wings, make themselves a subterranean cell, some singly, others in 

 common. From which it appears that some colonies have more than one 

 female, from their first establishmeot. 



