ANTS, BEES, WASPS, AND THEIR KINDRED 115 



which soon become clothed with vegetation. Others, 

 again, make their habitations in rotten wood, in 

 bramble stems, among moss, or beneath stones. The 

 popular belief that ants, or "emmets," can sting is 

 only partially true. The large ants of the fir woods 

 have no stinging apparatus, although they are able to 

 eject an acid poison from the tip of the abdomen into 

 a wound that they have made by biting. Some of our 

 small ants, however, have stings. The members of an 

 ant community do not die off at the approach of winter, 

 but retire to subterranean chambers, where they hiber- 

 nate. Ants are noted for their habit of allowing, or 

 actually encouraging, other insects to live with them in 

 their nests. Among these "guests" are aphides and 

 certain kinds of beetles, whose secretions are palatable 

 to the ants ; but there are other insects which appear 

 to give nothing in return for the hospitality that they 

 receive, and why these should be tolerated is not known. 

 The true wasps, 1 as distinct from the digger-wasps, 

 referred to above, may be easily recognized by the 

 fact that the fore- wing is folded lengthwise when the 

 insect is at rest, the hinder half of the wing being 

 doubled under the front half. So far as the writer is 

 aware, this character is not seen in any other Hymen- 

 optera. The family is divided into two sub-families 

 viz., the solitary wasps 2 and the social wasps. 3 

 Members of the former group have one spine on the 

 tibia of the middle leg where it joins the tarsus, and 

 the tarsal claws of all the legs are toothed. Further, 

 the species are solitary in habit i.e., they do not live 

 in communities, but each female builds and provisions 

 her own nest-cells without assistance from other 

 members of her kind. Our sixteen British species are 

 1 Vespidce. 2 Eumeninct. 3 Vespince. 



