ANTS AND THEIR COLONTES 147 
with as many as twenty workers of F’. fusca var. subsericea and 
their brood, she is received with great hostility. At first her con- 
duct is patient and insinuating, or even somewhat timid, but the 
persistent pulling and tweaking to which she is subjected by the 
workers soon throws her into a frenzy of rage. She falls upon 
her tormentors, drives them from their brood and, when they 
persevere in returning, kills them one by one. With feverish 
haste she then appropriates the pupz, secretes them in some 
corner and carefully guards them, ever on the alert with open 
mandibles to attack an intruder, till the workers are ready to 
hatch. She deftly frees the pale drab callow young from their 
pupal envelopes, and immediately adopts them, thus quickly 
surrounding herself with the means of nourishing both herself 
and her own progeny as soon as the latter are brought forth. 
The immediate result of these tactics is to produce a small 
mixed colony consisting of a female of one species of Formica 
and a number of workers of another, exactly as in the consocians- 
icerta colony, but with the interesting and important difference 
that in this case the zucerta workers are effete or moribund, or 
at any rate older than the queen, whereas the subsericea workers 
in the case of rubicunda are younger than the queen and have 
before them a lease of life amounting to three or four years. 
The result, moreover, in the case of rubicunda is not achieved 
passively, by adoption of the queen, as in consocians, but actively, 
by conquest and abduction. Of course, none of these differences 
is apparent from mere inspection of an incipient mixed colony of 
consocians or rubicunda, but can be ascertained only through 
studying the behavior of the queen during the period that elapses 
between the nuptial flight and the establishment of her colony. 
The author’s experiments with queens of our shining amazon 
(Polyergus rufescens subsp. lucidus) and workers of the species 
which it enslaves (Formica schaufusst) have, up to the present 
time, given contradictory results. All of these queens, when 
introduced into artificial nests containing schaufusst workers, 
were violently attacked. Some of them retaliated by ruth- 
lessly killing all the latter, but remained perfectly indifferent to 
their larvee and pupe. Other queens, however, were more in- 
sinuating and far less bloodthirsty and, though equally indifferent 
