SOLENOPSIS. 105 



them, because they are too large to enter the galleries. The little 

 Solenopsis, therefore, are quite safe, and, as it appears, make 

 incursions into the nurseries of the larger ant, and carry off the 

 larvae as food. It is as if we had small dwarfs, about eighteen 

 inches to two feet long, harbouring in the walls of our houses, and 

 every now and then carrying off some of our children into their 

 horrid dens." 



The marriage flight takes place in September and October, and 

 although there are a number of males and winged females in the 

 Dale collection at Oxford, taken by him on August 26th and 28th, 

 1895, at Portland, these were probably found in the nests, as was 

 the case with my Blackgang specimens. 



Schenck 3 gives September 22nd and October, Mayr 5 states that 

 large swarms of the males and females may be seen in the air on 

 still warm evenings after rain in the autumn, and Forel 12 says the 

 males and winged females are to be found in the nests from the 

 beginning of August to September, and records marriage flights 

 towards the end of the afternoon on September 5th, 16th, and 

 24th. He 10 has observed the workers attending the winged forms, 

 when they came out of the nest, as far as the herbage, up which 

 the latter climbed preparatory to flying away, and on the same 

 day he has seen couples on the ground, fallen together after the 

 marriage flight ; and he found an isolated fertile female at Vaux 

 on May 9th, 1871 12 . 



Santschi describes a curious gynandromorph taken by Montandon 

 at Mangalia in Roumania in which the head and thorax is female 

 and the pedicel and gaster male 33 . 



Their colonies are generally very populous, one described by 

 Wasmann 18 which he found in a nest of Formica pratensis at 

 Roermond consisted of 100,000 workers and 20 queens. 



Their food consists of the larvae and pupae of other ants, the 

 juices of insects, etc., and they appear to keep and milk root 

 Aphidae, indeed Andre 14 considers this to be their principal means 

 of subsistence, though Janet 24 rather thinks that it consists of the 

 brood of other ants. Both Forel 11 and Wasmann 18 found that they 

 milked a rose-coloured root Aphis, and the former 10 also mentions 

 a small yellow species, whilst once having thrown a large cupful of 

 the cocoons of Formica pratensis among the herbage he observed 

 a number of the workers of Solenopsis come out of the ground and, 

 piercing the cocoons, cut up the pupae 11 . Janet 24 gave every day 

 to the Solenopsis in an artificial double nest he had under observa- 

 tion of Solenopsis fugax and Formica rufibarbis ten Donisthorpea 

 female cocoons, which he placed near the orifice of the nest. The 

 Solenopsis did not wait long before emerging ; they climbed to the 

 number of ten to thirty on to each cocoon, and riddled them with 

 openings, which, uniting together, allowed them to get at the 

 contents. If it contained a pupa the legs and antennae provided 



