256 BRITISH ANTS. 



I never saw a single pair together in the air. Sometimes a female 

 would rise and fly straight up into the air, whilst others ran about 

 on the mound, and occasionally when a male had found a female, the 

 latter would refuse to have anything to do with him. I picked up 

 one pair in copulation, when the female turned round and bit the 

 male, and they separated. I found this female afterwards refused 

 any other male that approached her 84 . 



These ants commence to stir about February, according to the 

 weather, when on fine days the workers have a habit of massing 

 in the sun on the top of the nest, large numbers all resting in a heap 

 upon each other, and the queens start to lay about this time in 

 my observation nests they have begun to lay in December and 

 in nature these first eggs produce males and females, at least in 

 large, or older, nests. On March 29th, 1912, Crawley and I found a 

 very large rufa nest at St. George's Hill, Weybridge, which measured 

 six feet in diameter, and it contained vast quantities of large (male 

 and female) larvae and cocoons 89 , but in 1913 all rufa nests examined 

 by me were very backward, only eggs and very small larvae oc- 

 curring as late as May 4th 94 . 



The worker larvae are reared next, and worker cocoons will be 

 found in the nests up to October. I have found eggs in nests as 

 late as August, and worker cocoons present in a nest at Wellington 

 College on September 28th, 1912, but no eggs, larvae, nor pupae 

 occur in the winter. 



The pupae are generally enclosed in cocoons the so-called 

 " ants' eggs " which are used as food for singing birds, pheasants, 

 etc., and robins are very fond of them, as, when a nest is disturbed, 

 one of these birds will often sit near by, and flying down on to the 

 nest, pick up a cocoon and fly off again. 



The callows are helped by the workers to emerge from the 

 cocoons, but they are also capable of liberating themselves. 



Naked pupae also occur ; many such pupae, which were evidently 

 pseudogynes, were present in a nest at Nethy Bridge in June, 

 191 1 84 , and on September 5th, 1913, I obtained a number of naked 

 worker pupae in a rufa nest at Weybridge. 



The Green Woodpecker is an enemy to F. rufa, as it devours 

 these ants in the winter, making a long funnel-shaped hole in the 

 hillock and extracting a number of individuals. I have seen these 

 holes in a large nest at Pyrford, and the late Sir Charles Dilke, on 

 whose property this colony occurred, told me that he had often 

 seen the woodpecker at work on this hillock. 



Bignell stated that a woodpecker will consume a small colony of 

 rufa in the winter 58 , and Wasmann records the ravages caused by 

 this bird in rufa and pratensis nests at Exaeten in Holland in Decem- 

 ber, 1894, and in 1898. On February 28th, 1899, he found near 

 rufa nests fifty droppings of the Green Woodpecker, containing no 

 less than ten thousand rufa workers 67 . 



