CHAPTER VIII 

 A GUILD OF CARPENTER ANTS 



THE warm, soft spring days fill air and earth and 

 woods with multitudes of living things. Whence 

 have they come? And whence came the hordes of 

 black ants that have suddenly appeared on yonder 

 great white-oak-tree beyond the brook at the edge of 

 the grove? Did they come like the migratory birds? 

 No; although some insects are great travellers. Surely 

 they did not sprout into life like buds and grass and 

 wild flowers? Not quite so; and yet something like 

 that. They have been dormant during the winter. 

 The cold suspended animation. They were frozen, but 

 not killed. 



One winter I was able to place in the museum of the 

 Academy of Natural Sciences of Philatlelphia a unique 

 specimen — a large hill of the mound-making ants of the 

 Alleghanies, Formica exsectoides. This could be done 

 only in the dead of winter, when the great mound was 

 frozen hard, and could be dug out and shipped without 

 crumbling into the particles of soil from which it had 

 been built up. It was a difficult undertaking, as the 

 hill was brought from the mountains near Altoona; but 

 it was accomplished. 



Sometime after it had been installed in the museum 

 a messenger came in haste to my house with an urgent 



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