1917] Wheeler—Marriage Flights of Some Sonoran Ants eT 
NOTES ON THE MARRIAGE FLIGHTS OF SOME 
SONORAN ANTS. 
By Witu1aMm Morton WHEELER. 
Myrmecological literature contains many accounts of the 
marriage-flight of ants, but in nearly all cases the descriptions are 
fragmentary, owing to the complexity of the phenomena, the great 
area over which they occur and the obstacles, such as forests, 
hills or buildings which in most localities interfere more or less 
with observation. Moreover, the actual mating of the males and 
females often takes place high in the air or even at night, so that 
one is apprised of the occurrence of a flight only by finding the 
recently fecundated and deiilated queens running about on the 
ground. The following observations made during the past sum- 
mer near Cloudcroft, N. M., and later while I was accompanying 
the Cornell Biological Expedition across the deserts of southern 
Arizona, are in some respects as incomplete as others which have 
been published, but since they illustrate interesting peculiarities 
in the behavior of a few of the more conspicuous ants of the So- 
noran region, it seems advisable to record them. 
1. Liometopum apiculatum Mayr. 
This ant, which has huge females and males, out of all proportion 
to the small workers, is peculiar to the live-oak zone, or “‘encinal” 
of the dry mountains of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado 
and therefore does not live at altitudes above 6,000—-7,000 feet. 
At the latter altitude near Wooten, in the Sacramento Mountains 
of New Mexico, I found it to be very scarce. Undoubtedly it is 
abundant at lower elevations in the same range. During the mar- 
riage flight, however, the males and females are carried by air- 
currents to considerably greater altitudes. July 3, while walking 
down Haine’s Canyon, a few miles from Cloudcroft, I saw numer- 
ous males of apiculatum, which had fallen on the road at altitudes 
between 8,000 and 8,500 feet. As some of them were still alive the 
marriage flight of the species must have occurred on this or the 
preceding day. They were being rapidly dragged away as food 
by foraging Formica fusca workers. July 5, near Russia, at an al- 
titude of 9,400 feet, I detected four deiilated apiculatum queens, 
each in a small cavity under a stone. All of them were dead and 
