THE ANT-COLONY AS AN ORGANISM old 
observers and myself have found a number of queen-ants that are 
unable to found colonies without the aid of workers of allied spe- 
cies. These queens may be separated into four groups, as follows: 
1. The queen which enters a colony of an alien species and 
decapitates its queen or is the occasion of her being killed off by 
her own workers. The intrusive queen is then adopted by the 
workers and a compound colonial organism arises, consisting of 
the germ-plasm of one species and the soma of another. The queen 
proceeds to lay eggs, which are reared by the alien workers, thus 
relieving her of all the labor and exhaustion endured by the inde- 
pendent typical ant-queen during the early stages of colony for- 
mation. Pari passu with the development of the worker off- 
spring of the intrusive queen, the worker nurses grow old and die, 
so that the colony eventually comes to consist of only one species, 
the soma of the host being replaced by that of the parasite. This 
method of colony formation, first observed among our American 
ants and later among certain Huropean and North African species, 
I have called temporary social parasitism. Now many of the 
species, which behavein this manner, have extremely small queens, 
or queens provided with a peculiar pilosity or sculpture that tend 
to endear them to the workers of the alien colonies which they 
invade. If we regard the large fertilized queens of ordinary ants, 
which are supplied with a voluminous fat-body and wing-muscu- 
lature, as representing eggs provided with a great amount of yolk, 
and the diminutive queens of the temporary social parasites as 
the equivalents of alecithal eggs, we have another striking resem- 
blance between the personal and colonial organisms, for the large 
queens, like the yolk-laden eggs of many vertebrates, are produced 
in small numbers but are able to generate the colonial soma inde- 
pendently, whereas the small queens, which are produced in 
great numbers, in order that some of them may survive the vicissi- 
tudes of a parasitic life, correspond to the small yolk-less eggs of 
many parasites, which have to be deposited in plant or animal 
tissues in order that the imperfect young on hatching may be 
surrounded by an abundance of food. 
2. The queen of the blood-red slave-maker (Formica san- 
guinea) adopts a different method. She enters the colony of an 
