194 BRITISH ANTS. 



Wey bridge Heath. It was almost impossible to discover whence 

 they came, but eventually I found the ants had constructed a 

 tunnel, about an inch in diameter, just beneath the surface of the 

 ground. This tunnel extended for six yards, when it entered a 

 sandy bank, and deep in this bank their large carton nest was 

 situated. 



Haliday found this Donisthorpea on an undulating expanse of 

 bleached sand off Arklow Head in August, 1856 ; he says the ants 

 were far away from any trees, but seemed quite busy and happy in 

 the torrid heat 12 . 



I have also seen it nesting in the sand near the sea ; the colony 

 in question was situated in a hollow in the sand-dunes at South- 

 port 49 , no trees occurred anywhere near, and the ants entered and 

 left their nest by a hole in the sand. 



Schenck 6 records the occurrence of two nests in the hollow wall 

 of a Garden-house near Homburg, which he says were made of 

 bits of wood and plants, and little stones all fastened together. 

 The one measured two feet in height, two feet in breadth, and half 

 a foot in thickness, and the other was of the same height and 

 thickness, but was only one foot and a half broad. He says a 

 gardener had known of the existence of the ants in this house for 

 about thirty or forty years, and he also mentions another nest in 

 the straw roof of an ice-house. 



Holt 18 in 1868 saw a nest in the floor of a house at Upper Norwood 

 which was built between two of the joists and rested on the ceiling 

 of the cellar below. He says the ants passed in and out of the 

 house under the doorstep, and the nest seemed to be composed of 

 masticated wood. Crawley 53 knew of a similar nest in the beams 

 of the cellar in a house he lived in, W. E. Sharp showed me a 

 grating in the wall of his house at Crowthorne where these ants 

 gained access to his cellar, and Nevinson told me a colony had 

 established itself under the concrete floor of a lavatory in his 

 house at Cobham he has recently had the floor taken up, and he 

 found a nest one foot four inches high, by one foot six inches 

 wide. He showed me the remains of this nest, and the place whence 

 it came, and he assures me that though the ants had lived in his 

 house for some years, they merely took exercise in the hall without 

 hunting for food and they never went out of doors at all. This 

 being the case it would seem that the fungus cultivated by the ants 

 is sufficient to sustain the colony ! Also, as will be seen presently, 

 the great difficulty experienced in rearing fuliginosa larvae in 

 captivity when no carton is present would seem to show that 

 the fungus is necessary as food, though the ants feed on other 

 substances as well. These remarks will apply in part to D. umbrata 

 also. 



Oudemans 42 has described and figured a nest he found in 1885 

 in the roof of an ice-shed in Holland which measured thirty-seven 



