222 BRITISH ANTS. 



On August 6th, 1904, Crawley found four females together 

 under a stone at Oddington, but as there was no brood and no 

 enclosed cell it was probably only a temporary retreat immediately 

 after the marriage flight and shedding of wings 43 . 



Hamm dug up an assembly of no less than 16 queens of flava with 

 about twelve small workers, in the New Forest on April 16th, 1911, 

 which he kept in captivity 43 . No hostility was observed among 

 the females, some of which laid eggs, and larvae were reared, but 

 the whole colony gradually died off, without any workers being 

 brought up. 



Wasmann made a discovery in 1909 which seems to indicate that 

 though many females of flava may start a colony together, they 

 eventually split up into groups of not more than two. On Septem- 

 ber 29th, 1909, he found under a stone in a small cell, at Luxemburg, 

 four females with eggs and a dead mutilated body of a fifth, 

 which he thought might have been killed by the others. 

 After the first larvae had hatched the females split up into two 

 groups of two each 39 . This species being much less pugnacious 

 than nigra, fighting among the females is probably of much rarer 

 occurrence. 



It is certainly extremely rare to find more than two queens in 

 a well-established flava colony, and usually only one is present. 

 On May 14th, 1913, I observed two dealated females in a colony 

 at Bletchington 45 , but on June 9th, 1913, I discovered three 

 dealated females in a very large and populous flava colony under 

 a big stone on Lundy Island 44 . 



D. flava will not usually receive strange females of its own 

 species into its nest, and, though not so hostile to ants from strange 

 colonies as nigra, yet objects to their presence and drives them from 

 its nests. 



Lord Avebury made five experiments, in all of which, nests of 

 flava, both with and without a queen of their own, refused to 

 accept a strange fertile flava female, and he concluded that, at 

 any rate in the case of this species, the workers will not adopt an 

 old queen from another nest 20 . On rare occasions, however, 

 workers of flava may accept a strange queen, or one of their own 

 females after fecundation, as Crawley has made several experi- 

 ments in which such results have been obtained. To mention one 

 of these : In July, 1897, he had a queenless colony of D. flava, con- 

 taining however ten winged virgin females, in a Lubbock nest. 

 A strange fertile female was then taken and put in a box with four 

 workers from this nest, and as they seemed friendly the box was 

 turned on its side close to the door of the nest. Presently the 

 workers entered the nest, and the female of her own accord fol- 

 lowed them ; ants saluted her, only two attacked her, and finally 

 she was accepted as queen, shortly after which the workers killed 

 all the winged females in the nest 43 . 



