34 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XXII, 



The queen bee is a degenerate organism — a perambulating ovary, 

 incapable of founding a colony unaided, shorn of the primitive pollen- 

 collecting apparatus and instincts of the ancestral wild bees, no 

 longer capable of visiting the flowers and of feeding either herself or 

 her offspring. The worker bee, on the other hand, apart from her 

 normal infertility, is more like the ancestral female bee in still retain- 

 ing all the attributes of that sexual form. While the queen bee has 

 thus, as it were, delegated to her workers all the female functions 

 and structures except those of normal reproduction, the great majority 

 of female ants, as the following paper will abundantly show, have lost 

 very few or none of the primitive female instincts of the species. In 

 fact, the instincts of the ant-species have their center of gravity, so 

 to speak, in the female and not, as is usually supposed, in the worker. 

 That nearly all writers on these insects should be more or less biased 

 by the study of the honey-bee, is due to the fact that the female ant 

 is apt to be stolid and very slow to respond to the stimuli of her en- 

 vironment, while the instincts of the workers are persistently and con- 

 spicuously manifested. Yet the fertilized and isolated female ant is 

 self-sufficient in structure and instincts, since she is able to reproduce 

 the whole colony — males, females, and workers — from her own sub- 

 stance. She is not only the winged germ of the species, but the epit- 

 ome of its instincts, and, unlike the females of most Hymenoptera, 

 she undoubtedly adds to her inherited capacities the results of in- 

 dividual experience and imitation gained during her prenuptial sojourn 

 in the maternal nest. 



Female, or queen, ants in founding their colonies resort to one of 

 three methods, which may be known as the usual or typical, the redund- 

 ant, and the defective. In the first method there is a manifestation of 

 instincts of the ordinary and undoubtedly primitive type, as displayed 

 by nearly all the species of Formicidae; in the second there are ad- 

 ventitious instincts leading to a more complicated activity, and in 

 the third method there is a lapsing of original instincts and a substi- 

 tution of others. More explicitly, these different methods may be 

 described, as follows: 



I . The female ant is able by herself alone to start her colony ; that 

 is, under favorable circumstances she can produce and bring to matur- 

 ity the first brood of workers and thus insure the further growth and 

 development of the colony. She is capable of passing many months 

 without nourishment even while she is feeding her offspring. Her 

 voluminous fat-body, built up during her larval life in the maternal 

 nest, together with her degenerating wing-muscles, furnish the sub- 



