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Article IV. — ON THE FOUNDING OF COLONIES BY QUEEN 



ANTS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE 



PARASITIC AND SLAVE-MAKING SPECIES. 



By William Morton Wheeler. 



Plates VIII-XIV. 



Introduction. 



The following paper is a continuation of work previously pub- 

 lished on our North American symbiotic ants. It comprises a series 

 of observations and experiments made during the past summer while 

 I was on a month's vacation in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut, 

 a locality abounding in interesting Formicidae. Somewhat later in 

 the season the work was continued at my home in Bronxville, New 

 York. I had planned to devote all my time to ascertaining the 

 method of colony formation adopted by young queens of our common 

 slave-making ants (Formica sanguinea subspecies and varieties), but 

 the opportunity to renew my study of Formica consocians , the dis- 

 covery of another interesting and probably parasitic species {F. 

 nepticula) with diminutive females, and the opportunity of perform- 

 ing some experiments on still other species of the F. rufa group, in- 

 duced me to enlarge the scope of my work. As the habits of all these 

 species have been hitherto very imperfectly known, I have included 

 some illustrations of their nest architecture. 



While the exclusive and intensive study of the structure and ethol- 

 ogy of a single type is unquestionably of great value if only as a guide 

 to what we may expect to find in allied but as yet unstudied forms, 

 this method is, nevertheless, sometimes misleading and illusive, for 

 the very reason that it may lead us to prejudge a field of inquiry. 

 It would be difficult to find a better illustration of the truth of this 

 statement than the study of the honey-bee. The remarkable con- 

 clusions reached from the long and painstaking investigation of this 

 economic insect, have been again and again extended, either un- 

 consciously or intentionally, to the other groups of social insects. 

 And it is especially the instincts 'of the queen bee that have been thus 

 adopted as a paradigm of the female instincts in other Hymenoptera 

 such as the ants. A moment's reflection, however, shows the error 

 involved in any such generalization even when extended to insects 

 as closely related to the honey-bee as the humble-bees and the wasps. 

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