PHENOMENA IN LIVES OF ANTS. 1 35 



B. Last summer, on Cape Ann, I kept a colony of formicid 

 ants, that were living in their natural nest under a single stone, 

 abundantly supplied with crushed insects, sugar, and sponge-cake, 

 the supply being protected from rain and renewed at least twice 

 a week. I also arranged annexes to the nest, and these proved 

 so acceptable to the ants that they moved part of their colony into 

 my additions to their residence. At the end of June, when I 

 first observed this nest, there was a great number of queen- 

 pupae in it but no queen was visible to me. Early in July there 

 were numerous newly hatched queens, and from that time until 

 the eighth of September, when I left Cape Ann, the queens were 

 countless, and there had been no observed swarming from the 

 nest. Somewhat similar observations made by me upon other 

 natural nests have suggested the possibility that the retention of 

 more than one queen by certain species of ants, including Ste- 

 namma fulvum may result from abundance of nutriment, attain- 

 able without excessive labor on the part of the workers. 



C. In my formicaries, ants of two species, Lasius latipes and 

 Camponotits Jierculaneus, neither of which is a tent-builder, as 

 well as the tent-building ant, Cremastogaster dneolata, have at 

 different times protected their young from light by making, dur- 

 ing the night, a continuous layer of small pellets of earth on the 

 top of a pane of transparent glass, that I had placed horizontally 

 over a hollow in which the young were assembled. Since all 

 ants habitually withdraw their young from the ultra-violet rays 

 of light, it appears probable that the tent-building ants erect their 

 peculiar structures for the purpose of shielding their young from 

 these rays ; and the above recorded observations, on ants of 

 another subfamily, indicate that specific conditions may impel 

 other than tent-building ants to become tent-builders. 



D. For correct interpretation of the behavior of ants observa- 

 tion needs be indefinitely prolonged. Sometimes the real animus 

 of one ant toward another is revealed only after weeks or months 

 of continuous association. Some ant-sisters, Camponotits pennsyl- 

 vanicus, reared by me and indisputably the offspring of the same 

 queen-mother, were separated all their lives, the younger in one 

 group, and their elders by a year in another group. The two 

 groups were gradually and cautiously made acquainted with one 



