Wasps, Bees, and Ants 537 



lacking in knowledge concerning the exact mode or modes of the estab- 

 lishment and beginning life of new colonies. Whether after the mating 

 flight a fertilized queen unaccompanied by workers can found a new com- 

 munity, or whether such fertilized queens are found after they come to 

 the ground and remove their wings and are taken charge of by a group 

 of workers which then take the queen into an already existing community 

 or with her establish a new one; or whether, as seems probable, most of 

 these modes of procedure are repre- 

 sented in the life-history of various differ- 

 ent ant species all these questions are 

 by no means well answered on a basis 

 of careful observation and experimenta- 

 tion. Most of the observations which 

 have been made on the founding of new 

 communities seem to show that a fertil- 

 ized queen begins alone the establish- 

 ment of a new community by building a FIG. 742. Soldier and worker of Phei- 

 little nest, laying a few eggs, caring for ^ mutata ' (After Wheefcrj en- 

 the hatching larvae herself, and thus 



raising by her unaided exertions a small brood of neuter workers which 

 are always normally undersized, probably from insufficient nourishment. 

 This mode of community founding is just like that obtaining among 

 the social wasps and the bumblebees. Leidy and Comstock have ob- 

 served such a mode of founding new colonies by the common carpenter- 

 ant of the East, Camponotus pennsylvanicus, and in Europe Myrmica 

 ruginodis, Camponotus ligniperdus, and Lasius alienus have been noted 

 to follow the same procedure. An interesting fact in these cases is that 

 the food given the larvae by the queen is supplied from her own body, 

 by regurgitation through the mouth, no food whatever being brought into 

 the nest from the time that the queen first begins to lay eggs until this first 

 brood is matured. Wheeler, whose admirable recent studies of American 

 ants have revealed many important and intensely interesting facts in the 

 life of our American ant communities, finds among the Ponerine species, 

 undoubtedly in most respects the least specialized of the ants, that the colonies, 

 all of which are small, "appear to be annual growths, formed by swarming 

 as in the bees, and not by single fertilized female ants unaccompanied by 

 workers." 



The workers of the first brood begin immediately to take on themselves 

 the work of the little community, the queen from now on having only to pro- 

 duce eggs. First of all comes the enlarging of the nest. Ants' nests, com- 

 prising a sum of irregular chambers and galleries, are mostly built under- 

 ground, although some have a considerable part above the normal ground 



