144 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
HOW THE QUEENS OF THE PARASITIC AND SLAVE-MAKING 
,ANTS ESTABLISH THEIR COLONIES. 
CONTINUATION of the author’s study of tem- 
porary social parasitism among ants, briefly 
noticed a year ago in the AMERICAN MusEUM 
JournaAL (Vol. IV, p. 74), has brought to light 
some interesting facts concerning the establish- 
ment of formicaries in several of our species. It is now well 
known that an ant colony is started by a single fertilized female, 
or queen. This insect, after mating high in the air during her 
nuptial flight, descends, pulls off her wings, and proceeds to dig 
a tiny nest in the ground or in rotten wood. She closes the en- 
trance behind her and remains secluded and without food for 
nine or ten months, while she lays a packet of eggs and cares for 
the larvee when they hatch. Until the larvae mature as workers, 
the queen feeds them with salivary secretion derived from her 
own fat-body and degenerating wing-muscles. These firstling 
workers are always small, because as larvee they were insuffi- 
ciently fed. They open the entrance to the nest, and go forth in 
search of food for their queen and themselves. The mother 
insect 1s now able to devote all her energies to assimilating 
nourishment and producing eggs, while the workers care for the 
brood and extend the galleries of the nest and give it whatever 
external architecture 1t may possess. 
This method of colony formation, which is adopted by 
nearly all ants, may be called the typical method. There are, 
however, two other methods which are resorted to by the queens 
of certain species, one of a more complicated, or redundant, the 
other of a simpler, or defective type. The redundant type occurs 
among the leaf-cutting and fungus-growing ants (Attzz) of tropical 
and subtropical America, in which the queen not only brings up a 
colony of workers by herself alone, but simultaneously keeps up 
a culture of the peculiar fungus which, so far as known, consti- 
tutes the only food of these ants. The defective type is found 
in certain ants whose queens, either because they are too small 
and infertile, or for some unknown reason, are unable to bring up 
a firstling brood without the assistance of workers of another 
