THE ANIMAL LIFE OF THE GROUP. 413 



check. Dr. W. II. Ashmead, in his treatise on the Hawaiian forms, discusses four- 

 teen families belonging- to this suborder, to which he refers one hundred and 

 twenty-eight .species as belonging to sixty-nine genera. Eighty-seven of the 

 species were described by him as new. To this number several species have 

 since been added, but as the very largest Hawaiian species do not exceed 

 twenty millimeters, and by far the greater number are less than five milli- 

 meters in length, and as a great many have been described from a single 

 specimen, we may infer that, in spite of their interesting habits, they are too 

 small to attract much attention from the layman. 



The stinging Hymenoptera includes about two Imndred well-marked spe- 

 cies. Of these a large number are peculiar to the islands. As the ma.jority 

 of the species are fair-sized, handsome insects, they have been more extensively 

 collected. The group includes the ants, digger-wasps, the true wasps and the 

 bees. To the twenty species of ants >'^ listed by Prof. A. Forel as occurring in Ha- 

 waii, six species have since been added, the majority of which are new arrivals. 

 As a matter of fact, there appears to be but one or two endemic species of ants 

 in the islands. Most of those found here are slightly-varied forms of widely- 

 distributed species. Only one species (Ponera pcrkinsi) is defiiiitely stated to 

 be Hawaiian. It occurs in small colonies of a dozen or so in moist localities 

 high in the mountains. 



Ants occur commonly in great numbers abmit houses, and everywhere 

 attract attention owing to their so-called instinctive powers. They invariably 

 live in organized communities or colonies, and exhibit as great a variety of 

 habits and customs as do the people living in the islands, for the people, like 

 the ants,, have been brought together in Hawaii from many foreign lands. The 

 ants found here live under boards and stones, and in the ground, and are as 

 industrious and thrifty as those King Solomon observed, to find that they, 

 having no guide, overseer or ruler, provided meat in the summer and gathered 

 food in the harvest. 



The home life of ants for obvious reasons has not been as fiiUy studied as 

 has that of the bees, but the division of labor in the colony is known to be 

 even more complex. Their habits furnish an interesting and ever-present field 

 for study and observation by old and young. 



The digger-wasps, or Fossores," may be readily distinguished from the 

 true wasps by the fact that their wings, when at rest, lie flat over the back and 

 the legs are arranged for walking or digging. There are about thirty-five 

 species so far reported from Hawaii, the most common being the introduced 

 mud-dauber " belonging to the thread-waisted wasp ^ family. They are to be 

 seen building their nests about lanais and outbuildings. When the nest is com- 

 pleted the eggs are deposited and the cell provisioned with spiders. The truly 

 native species are reported to prey entirely iipon tlies. The principal genus, 

 Crabro, represented by fifteen species, is distributed in the mountains of the 

 larger islands. 



