fieldk] communal LIFE OF ANTS 245 



be smeared with the blood of another species, it may appear 

 among its former comrades as a sheep in wolf's clothing and 

 may be treated as if it were an enemy ; or if it be smeared with 

 the blood of a member of the community, it may be introduced 

 into that community, where it is truly a wolf in sheep's clothing, 

 and may for some days escape detection there. 



It is probable that every species of ant has its distinctive odor, 

 borne by every member of the species whether male or female, 

 and that this odor excites the animosity of ants of other species 

 than its own merely becarse it is unfamiliar. While ants of 

 unlike species, having never before met, will attack and rend 

 each other when brought together, it is possible to create a happy 

 family including diverse species. In 1903 I took ants represent- 

 ing three different sub-families and sequestered them, within 

 twelve hours after their hatching, in nests so small that the ants 

 would naturally touch each other w^ith their antennae during the 

 first five days of their lives, and I found that ants of many 

 diverse species thus made acquainted with one another in infancy 

 would live amicably together thereafter for months or years. 

 These experiments proved that the natural hostility existing be- 

 tween ants of unlike species could be eliminated by a suitable 

 education, and it also provided an explanation of the fact that 

 mixed colonies of ants are occasionally found in nature. Such 

 colonies probably have their origin in conditions that force the 

 members into propinquity during the first hours of active life. 



Ants have not only their specific odor, which characterizes each 

 species and differentiates it in the ant-world from all other species, 

 but the female ants have also a progressive odor which changes 

 as they advance in age, and which is the cause of the separation 

 of ants of the same species into distinct communities, hostile to 

 one another. The male ant, who is welcomed into any community 

 of his own species, probably bears no odor beside his specific odor. 

 The queen ant doubtless gives to her female progeny her own 

 progressive odor, modified by that of their father's mother, latent 

 in the male. With an odor that, at hatching, is very nearly the 

 same as that of their queen mother, the worker ants gradually 

 change their odor, forty days being the minimum of time in which 

 there occurs a change so great as to be noticeable by the ants 

 themselves. This progressive odor eventually differentiates ant- 



