52 THE DURATION OF LIFE. 



On the other hand, Sir John Lubbock never succeeded in keeping 

 the males 'alive longer than a few weeks.' Both the older and 

 more recent observers agree in stating that female ants, like 

 queen bees, are always protected as completely as possible from 

 injury and danger. Dr. A. Forel, whose thorough knowledge of 

 Swiss ants is well known, writes to me, ' The female ants are only 

 once fertilized, and are then tended by the workers, being cleaned 

 and fed in the middle of the nest : one often finds them with only 

 three legs, and with their chitinous armour greatly worn. They 

 never leave the centre of the nest, and their only duty is to lay 

 eggs.' 



With regard to the workers, Forel believes that their constitution 

 would enable them to live as long as the females (as the experiments 

 of Lubbock also indicate), and the fact that in the wild state they 

 generally die sooner than the females is ' certainly connected with 

 the fact that they are exposed to far greater dangers.' The same 

 relation seems also to obtain among bees, but with them it has not 

 been shown that in confinement the workers live as long as the 

 queens. 



Sees. According to von Berlepsch * the queen may as an excep- 

 tion live for five years, but as a rule survives only two or three 

 years. The workers always seem to live for a much shorter period, 

 generally less than a year. Direct experiments upon isolated or 

 confined bees, or upon marked individuals in the wild state, do not 

 prove this, but the statistics obtained by bee-keepers confirm the 

 above. Every winter the numbers in a hive diminish from 

 1 2,00020,000 to 2000-3000. The queen lays the largest number 

 of eggs in the spring, and the workers which die before the winter 

 are replaced by those which emerge in the summer, autumn or 

 during a mild winter. The queen lays eggs at such a variable 

 rate throughout the year that the above-mentioned inequality in 

 numbers is explained. The workers do not often live for more than 

 six to seven months, and at the time of their greatest labour, (May 

 to July), only three months. An attempt to calculate the length 

 of life of the workers and drones by taking stock at the end of 



(before their death), but there was no loss of any limb nor any abrasion.' This last 

 observation seems to indicate that queen ants may live for a much longer period in 

 the wild state, for it is stated above that the chitin is often greatly worn, and some 

 of the limbs lost (see pp. 48, 51, and 52). E. B. P.] 



1 A. von Berlepsch, 'Die Biene und ihre Zucht,' etc., 3rd ed.; Mannheim, 1872. 



