182 Psyche [December 
another queen leave the entrance with a similar burden. This 
led me to examine some twenty nests—all, in fact, that I had time 
to excavate before I was obliged to proceed with the party. My 
rather hurried observations showed that about half of the craters 
had been established by single queens but that the others were 
each the work of two codperating queens. One crater actually 
contained five queens, four deiilated and one with intact wings! 
It appears, therefore, that about 50 per cent. of the colonies of 
mimicus are pleometrotic in origin. That they probably remain 
so is indicated by the fact that on former excursions in Arizona I 
have on several occasions taken more than one deilated queen 
from a single adult colony of this ant. 
The foregoing observation is of interest to the myrmecologist, 
because the mimicus queens were actively codperating in the con- 
struction of a single nest as if they had been so many workers, 
whereas in the rare cases of Lasius flavus and brevicornis above 
cited the consociation of two queens may be interpreted as due to 
an accidental meeting under the same stone just after the marriage 
flight. Of course, it is very probable that in all the cases the 
queens in the same nest were sisters that had met after fecunda- 
tion, since queens from different maternal nests would hardly work 
together so harmoniously. Nevertheless, the very high percentage 
of cases of primary pleometrosis in mimicus points to the existence 
in this ant of a pronounced tendency for recently fecundated sisters 
to assemble in pairs or even greater numbers for the purpose of 
founding and developing a colony in common. 
r 
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE NOSE FLY AND OTHER 
SPECIES OF GASTROPHILUS IN THE UNITED 
STATES.1 
By F. C. BisHopp, 
Bureau of Entomology, Dallas, Texas. 
The distribution of the species of bot flies in the United States 
is a question which has been much neglected. Each is of consid- 
erable importance to stock raisers and farmers in this country and 
1 Publighed by permission of the Chief of the Bureau of Entomology. 
