190 THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S RECORD. 
Homalus auratus. No Crabro emerged.—l. A. Box, Lieut., Great 
Glen, Leicester. November 18th. oA 
Srray notes on Nests or Myrmtica.—lI kept various nests of Myr- 
mica scabrinodis when I reared the larva of Lycaena arion, and again 
for the past twelve months I have had nests of the same species, and 
latterly of Myrmica laevinodis. Mr. Donisthorpe asks me to jot down 
some of my observations, which I do with some misgivings, as though - 
one or two items I have mentioned to him may, be of interest, I un- 
fortunately made no notes of them at the time of their occurrence, so 
have to trust to memory, which is not always a safe proceeding. I 
kept notes of my Lycaena larvee and their relations with the ants, but — 
of the ants the only notes I made had reference to the headless ant, 
whose history is given on page 42 of this year’s H’nt. Record. 
The nest of Myrmica scabrinodis in which the headless ant had 
lived, was without a queen and was falling short of brood, especially as 
I had robbed it of some to supply nests with larve of L. alcon, the 
alcon in this nest having died. 
On April 8th, 1918, Mr. Donisthorpe sent me three or four lots of 
M. scabrinodis for the sake of the brood in them, wanted for L. alcon. 
One of these lots, a small one with little brood, possessed, however, a 
queen. As I had no other use for this small lot I put the queen with- 
out any of her own workers with her into the nest of the headless ant, 
knowing it was rather a risky experiment. The ants, however, almost 
immediately accepted her, and in the few following weeks she laid 
many eges and a good deal of brood was raised from them ; a little 
later, however, there were no more eggs and I could nowhere find the 
queen, what became of her I don’t know; this nest did not receive close 
attention, which was devoted to those containing L. alcon. Quite 
lately there have been eggs in this nest which must certainly have 
been laid by workers, these duly hatched. Males and females hatched 
in this nest in July, but were not very numerous; in August and 
September only males appeared; on September 15th and 16th I re- 
moved 87 males from this nest, and on October 5th 4 more had 
matured, and there was no brood whatever in the nest. 
Two nests of M. laevinodis each possessed several queens, one of 
them three, the other four. In one of these during August (and end of 
July) there hatched a large number of gs and no ¢?s. Whenever 
examined and the ants thereby disturbed, these g's harassed the 
workers very greatly, they got on their backs, almost preventing them 
from moving, “and seemed to be trying to pair with them, but without 
any approach to success. They even harassed each other in a similar 
way. Whether this occurred except on disturbance I don’t know. 
No trace of such behaviour was seen in any other nest, though several 
presented many g's, especially the M. scabrinodis nest of the headless 
ant. In this nest 3 s were in considerable excess. My observation in 
this case was not close enough to say whether they came from the 
worker eggs, but as all of these fed up, short as the time was, it 
may have been so. 
The different behaviours of the ants in different nests, in the matter 
of restlessness and attempting to escape was considerable. My nests 
were rather makeshifts, and removing contents of midden and supply- 
ing food, etc., could only be done by more or less opening the nests. 
