318 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



nests. 1 After this danse de V amour is celebrated, the males disappear, pro- 

 bably dying, or becoming, with many of the females, the prey of birds or 

 fish 2 ; for, since they do not return to the nest, they cannot be destroyed, 

 as some have supposed, like the drone bees, by the neuters. That many, 

 both males and females, become the prey of fish, I am enabled to assert 

 from my own observation. In the beginning of August, 1812, I was going 

 up the Orford river in Suffolk, in a row-boat, in the evening, when my at- 

 tention was caught by an infinite number of winged ants, both males and 

 females, at which the fish were everywhere darting, floating alive upon the 

 surface of the water. While passing the river these had probably been 

 precipitated into it, either by the wind, or by a heavy shower which had 

 just fallen. And M. Huber after the same event observed the earth 

 strewed with females that had lost their wings, all of which could not form 

 colonies. 3 



Captain Haverfield, R.N., gave me an account of an extraordinary ap- 

 pearance of ants observed by him in the Medway, in the autumn of 1814, 

 when he was first-lieutenant of the Clorinde, which is confirmed by the 

 following letter addressed by the surgeon of that ship, now Dr. Bromley, 

 to Mr. MacLeay : 



" In September, 1814, being on the deck of the hulk to the Clorinde, my 

 attention was drawn to the water by the first-lieutenant (Haverfield) ob- 

 serving there was something black floating down with the tide. On looking 

 with a glass, I discovered they were insects. The boat was sent, and 

 brought a bucket full of them on board ; they proved to be a large spe- 

 cies of ant, and extended from the upper part of Salt-pan Reach out 

 towards the Great Nore, a distance of five or six miles. The column 

 appeared to be in breadth eight or ten feet, and in height about six inches, 

 which I suppose must have been from their resting one upon another." 

 Purchas seems to have witnessed a similar phenomenon on shore. " Other 

 sorts (of ants)," says he, " there are many, of which some become winged 

 and fill the air with swarms, which sometimes happens in England. On 

 Bartholomew, 1613, I was in the Island of Foulness on our Essex shore, 

 where were such clouds of these flying pismires, that we could nowhere 

 fly from them, but they filled our clothes ; yea the floors of some houses 

 where they fell were in a manner covered with a black carpet of creeping 

 ants : which they say drown themselves about that time of the year in the 

 sea." 4 



These ants were winged ; whence, in the first instance here related, this 

 immense column came was not ascertained. From the numbers here 

 agglomerated, one would think that all the ant-hills of the counties of Kent 

 and Surrey could scarcely have furnished a sufficient number of males and 

 females to form it. 



When Colonel Sir Augustus Frazer, of the Horse Artillery, was sur- 

 veying on the 6th of October, 1813, the scene of the battle of the Pyrenees 

 from the summit of the mountain called Pena de Aya, or Les Quatre 

 Couronnes, he and his friends were enveloped by a swarm of ants, so 

 numerous as entirely to intercept their view, so that they were glad to 

 remove to another station, in order to get rid of them. 



The females that escape from the injury of the elements and their various 



i De Geer, ii. 1104. Gould, 99. 



3 Huber, 105. 4 Pilgrimage, 1090. 



