a2 
theory that their social organization must also represent the primitive 
condition of the true ants seems not to find confirmation in fact. The 
relatively small size of the colonies does not make them homologous 
with incipient ant colonies. They represent a different system of 
social organization. An increase in the size of the colonies of the 
keleps would not carry them in the direction of the true ants, but 
toward that of the drivers, unless they changed their habits and 
became vegetarians." 
These various considerations do not exclude, of course, the posst- 
bility that some of the families now included among the true ants 
may have descended from Ponerid stock, but if so we may expect to 
find that their breeding habits are not those now ascribed to ants as 
a natural group, it being highly improbable that insects which had 
become completely socialized, like the keleps, should abandon this 
condition and return to the relatively crude and wasteful system fol- 
lowed by the ants and termites. 
AMBIGUOUS USE OF THE TERM ‘‘SWARM.”’ 
Care has been taken in the preceding diagnoses of the types of 
social organization to refer to the simultaneous annual emergence 
of winged individuals of both sexes as a concourse, reserving the 
term swarm for its original use with the bees, and for an entirely 
analogous application to the kelep. 
With the bee and the kelep the swarm is made up of workers 
(undeveloped females), and it is obviously incorrect, or at least very 
inexact, to apply the same word to a collection of winged adults 
of both sexes, as among the ants and termites. 
Swarming, as with the bee and the kelep, is a process which does 
not take place at all in the other types of social organization. It 
results in the foundation of a new colony by the spontaneous subdi- 
vision of the workers of an older community, an occurrence not known 
among the termites and true ants. 
The simultaneous emergence of the newly matured males and 
females from all the nests of the species has for its object cross- 
fertilization. It is a time specialization not attained by the honey- 
bees nor by the keleps, among which facilities for interbreeding are 
maintained throughout the season. The swarming of the bee and 
the kelep has, in fact, no connection with the cross-fertilization of the 
alf the laying of few eggs and living in small colonies is to be looked upon as 
a primitive character, the genus Ponera is the most backward of the American 
series of Poneridie and the kelep the most advanced. Such a criterion can not 
be applied at random, however, since specialization may tend toward restricted 
fecundity as well as in the opposite direction. Whether an insect would prosper 
best in colonies of 10, 100, or 1.000 would depend on its habits and environment. 
