1906.] Wheeler, Habits of the Tent-building Ant. 1 1 



(IcBvinodis, scabrinodis, etc.). L. brunneus is especially devoted to 

 attending "enormous bark aphides, "which i;t covers with vaulted 

 galleries made of detritus." The forms of Myrmica above cited 

 ''make earthen cells on plants for the purpose of covering their 

 aphides. Some of these communicate with the nest by means of 

 vaulted passages running along the stem, others are built freely in the 

 air without a covered communication with the soil. It is especially 

 the latter which with Huber we may call pavilions. The aphides, 

 and particularly the coccids, are literally immured by the ants, 

 although their prison is rather roomy, and the ants can enter and 

 leave it through a little opening. I have seen a pavilion of M. 

 scabrinodis situated a few centimeters above the soil on an oak 

 branch. It was 1.5 cm. long and shaped like a cocoon. It enclosed 

 some Chermes which the ants were carefully attending. When these 

 pavilions communicate with the formicaries, the ants often carry 

 their larvae into them so that they become a simple dependence to the 

 nest. I have seen a pavilion thus built about a plant stem by Lasius 

 emarginatus. This pavilion also enclosed Chermes.'' Forel ^ has 

 also observed Brachymyrmex heeri constructing vaulted passage-ways 

 of vegetable debris between its nests and the coccids which it attends. 



Our common American form of Lasius niger (L. niger var. ameri- 

 canus), which is very closely related to the European alieniis. occa- 

 sionally builds detritus tents around the stems of plants. One of 

 these which I found during the past summer at Colebrook, Connecticut, 

 is represented in Fig. 3. A small colony of americanus, nesting under 

 a flat stone, was keeping aphides on a prostrate stem along which a 

 broad and very irregular gallery had been excavated. Around the 

 stem at the point where it emerged from under the stone, the ants 

 had woven a cylindrical tube of fine vegetable detritus about i-t 

 inches in length and closed at the outer end, as if to prevent the 

 aphides from escaping from the nest. 



Both Huber and Forel have described the much larger detritus 

 tents constructed around the stems of plants at a level with the 

 ground by Formica ruja. Very similar structures are built by our 

 fine large F. integra, a subspecies of rufa. In one locality near Cole- 

 brook I found several of these tents about the roots of some sapling 

 paper birches (Betula populifolia). Two of these tents are shown in 

 Figs. I and 2, PI. VI. One of them had been built around an aban- 

 doned bird's nest which happened to occupy the center of a cluster 

 of young trunks. Within these tents, which were about fifty feet 



' Etudes Myrm^cologiques en 1875. Bull. Soc. Vaud. Sc. Nat., XIV, 1875, pp- 39. 40. 



