138 A Field Naturalists Holiday. [Sess. 
—one of the Thysanuride—and is exceedingly active,—Lepis- 
mina polypoda. It is yellow, and blind like the crustacean. 
The ants kill it if they can catch it. It lives in an extra- 
ordinary way. Ants carry a nutritive fluid in their crop, and 
feed other ants by disgorging it into their mouths. When 
that operation is going on the Lepismina comes up cautiously 
and catches a little drop, and then runs off as fast as it can. 
Like the Platyarthus, it seems to have a most acute scent, 
and to smell the droplets. Its usual food is the young ant 
larvee. 
The Formica fusca occupied another nest beside it. There 
was a colony of a very small ant, Salenopsis fuge. Its habit 
is to have its nest beside that of the Formica, and to make a 
communication between the two nests by very narrow galleries, 
by which it gets access to the nest of the larger ant, and lives 
on the undeveloped young. 
I was greatly interested in these ants’ nests—all the more 
so when I learned that M. Janet, who exhibited them, was 
not a naturalist by profession, but an engineer who occupied 
himself very much with social questions. I have written to 
M. Janet asking him where I could get any of his earthenware 
nests, so I may be able to show them at some future meeting 
of this Society. If some of us could start a few ants’ nests, it 
would be most interesting, and I do not see any more difficulty 
in doing so than in keeping half a dozen beehives. 
Farther on in the same building there is a large exhibit of 
objects connected with bee-keeping. On account of the fine 
climate bees are very much kept in France—so far as my 
own observation goes, too much in the old-fashioned straw 
skep. There were splendid collections of insects injurious to 
bees and to plants in general. About the time I arrived in 
Paris there was an Apicultural Congress, and I must mention 
to you one of the communications made to that congress by 
M. Giraud Pabout. All the members know that it is only the 
queen in a hive which lays the eggs, and she lays an immense 
number. The workers have short lives—a few weeks only— 
and the bee society is continually recruited by the new brood. 
It is of the greatest importance, therefore, to have good queens, 
so as to have good bees. An American has invented a way of 
manufacturing queens on an extensive scale, and the results 
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