INSECTS AND VERMES. 463 



All the females at this time are pregnant: the males that 

 ex 'ape being eaten, wander away and die. 



October 2. Flying ants, male and female, usually swarm 

 and migrate on hot sunny days in August and September ; 

 but this day a vast emigration took place in my garden, and 

 myriads came forth, in appearance from the drain which goes 

 under the fruit wall ; filling the air and the adjoining trees 

 and shrubs with their numbers. The females were full of 

 eggs. This late swarming is probably owing to the backward, 

 wet season. The day following, not one flying ant was to be 

 seen *. 



Horse-ants travel home to their nests laden with flies, which 

 they have caught, and the aureliae of smaller ants, which they 

 seize by violence. WHITE. 



In my Naturalist's Calendar for the year 1777, on Septem- 

 ber 6th, I find the following note to the article Flying Ants. 



I saw a prodigious swarm of these ants flying about the 

 top of some tall elm-trees (close by my house) ; some were 

 continually dropping to the ground as if from the trees, and 

 others rising up from the ground : many of them were joined 

 together in copulation ; and I imagine their life is but short, 

 for as soon as produced from the egg by the heat of the sun, 

 they propagate their species, and soon after perish. They 

 were black, somewhat like the small black ant, and had four 

 wings. I saw also, at another place, a large sort which were 

 yellowish. On the 8th of September, 1785, I again observed 

 the same circumstance of a vast number of these insects flying 

 near the tops of the elms and dropping to the ground. 



* [Had our author exercised his usual careful and continuous observation, 

 he would have found the cause of the absence of winged ants on the day 

 after he had seen their swarms on the ground. Had he watched them for 

 a very short time after they at first settled from their emigration, he would 

 luive s<-t >M every one of them, turning its head round, seize on one wing 

 after another with its jaws, and, with a half-rotatory jerk, pluck it neatly 

 oil'. Thus the ground becomes strewed with these no longer required 

 appendages. It is a busy scene, and one which I have watched with 

 niucli plensure and amusement. The self-mutilated insects have now be- 

 come stationary, and proceed forthwith to found their new colony. T. B.] 



