218 BRITISH ANTS. 



shire, Selkirk, Roxburgh, Forfar, Kincardine, South and North 

 Aberdeen, Banff, Elgin, the North Ebudes, East Ross, East and 

 West Sutherland, Caithness, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, and the 

 Shetlands ; and in Wales for Brecon, Carmarthen, Cardigan, and 

 Montgomery. 



I have only the following records for Ireland : Donegal, Louth, 

 Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow, Wexford, Carlow, West Mayo, West 

 Galway, Clare, Limerick, North Tipperary, Waterford, South Cork 

 and Kerry. 



Donisthorpea flava is a very abundant species, but it is not so 

 common nor so widely distributed as D. nigra. 



It has been called the " turf ant," as it chiefly nests in fields ; it 

 is fond of marshy ground, but occurs also in dry situations in the 

 outskirts, rides and clearings (but not in the interior) of woods, 

 rarely occurring in gardens, and never in houses, always nesting 

 in the ground, under stones, etc. 



D. flava raises the well-known earth mounds in meadows which 

 look like mole-hills covered with grass indeed Gould mistook 

 them for such, as he writes : ; ' The yellow Ants most frequently 

 make Choice of those little Eminencies cast up by Moles, from 

 whom they derive the Name of Mole-hills : But from the Habita- 

 tion they afford these Creatures are more usually called Ant or 

 Emmet Hills. Thus the Inconveniences produced by one Creature 

 tend to the Service of another." 2 Sometimes they occur in hundreds 

 in one field ; I have seen such fields near Balmer Lawn in the New 

 Forest, and at Oddington in Oxfordshire, etc. Wasmann has shown 

 that these hillocks do not occur in the sandy regions of Dutch 

 Limburg 23 . 



Sometimes these hills attain very large proportions ; I have 

 seen a large earthen mound raised by this ant in a ride in Park- 

 hurst Forest, which was quite three feet in height. 



Richardson called attention to the size and number of the ant- 

 hills of flava near Weymouth in 1894, and he suggested that in a 

 wet spring like the last, the earth (Oxford clay) gets rather sodden, 

 and the ants like to raise their dwellings as high as possible so that 

 they may be drier 26 . The chief reason of these hills, however, is 

 to obtain as much benefit as possible from the rays of the sun, and 

 to act as incubators for the ants' brood. 



Huber first pointed out that these ant-hills in the Alps have a 

 peculiar shape, and always face towards the east. He says : 

 " Those little Yellow Ants, that are in possession of the pucerons 

 or aphides, serve the purpose of a compass to the Mountaineers, 

 when they are enshrouded in thick fogs, or have lost their way 

 during the night. Their habitations, which are more common, and 

 more elevated in mountains than elsewhere, take an oblong and 

 almost regular shape. They lie in a direction east and west. Their 

 summit, and the greatest slope, always faces the east : but they 



