58 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



colony have lost all interest in them from the moment of 

 their return, and trouble themselves no more about them, 

 for they well know that the males have now fulfilled their 

 vocation.' The great majority of the fertilised females 

 share the same fate as the males. But a small proportion 

 find concealment in holes, which they either dig for them- 

 selves, or happen to find ready made, and there found a 

 new colony. The first thing they do is to pull off their 

 now useless wings, by scratching and twisting them, one 

 after the other, with the clawed ends of their feet. They 

 then lay their eggs, and become the queens of new 

 colonies. 



Forel says that no fertilised female ever returns to her 

 original home ; but that the workers keep back a certain 

 number of females which are fertilised before the swarming 

 takes place ; in this case the workers pull off the wings 

 of the fertilised females. The majority of observers, how- 

 ever, maintain that some of the females composing the 

 swarm return to their native home to become mothers 

 where they had been children. Probably both statements 

 are correct. A writer in the ' Grroniger Deekblad ' for 

 June 16, 1877, observes that, looking to the injurious 

 effects of in-breeding, the facts as related by Forel are less 

 probable than those related by other observers, and that, if 

 they actually occur, the females fertilised before flight axe 

 probably kept by the ants as a sort of ' reserve corps to 

 which the workers resort only in case of need, and if they 

 fail to secure any returning queens.' 



Nursing. — The eggs will not develop into larvae un- 

 less nursed. The nursing is effected by licking the 

 surface of the eggs, which under the influence of this 

 process increase in size, or grow. In about a fortnight, 

 during which time the workers carry the eggs from higher 

 to lower levels of the nest, and vice versa, according to the 

 circumstances of heat, moisture, &c., the larvae are hatched 

 out, and require no less careful nursing than the eggs. 

 The workers feed them by placing mouths together and re- 

 gurgitating food stored up in the crop or proventriculus 

 into the intestinal tract of the young. The latter show 

 their hunger by ' stretching out their little brown heads.' 



