The Ants 



houses. They are not so destructive to household effects as they 

 are annoying through their presence on articles of food. A friend 

 once told me a beautiful story of how he once bought a piece of 

 blackberry pie one night, in a dimly lighted railroad eating 

 house in a western town. He began to eat it and discovered an 

 acid flavor which he did not expect, and, carrying it to the light, 

 found it swarming with Monomorium pharaonis. This is not an 

 uncommon experience and simply indicates the countless num- 

 bers in which these little creatures occur sometimes in houses. 

 How to get rid of these ants is a difficult and serious question. 

 Their nests, occurring usually in walls, are hard to locate. Trap- 

 ping them with sweetened sponges afterwards soaked in hot 

 water is apparently sometimes almost hopeless on account of 

 their infinite number. Careful watching, however, will usually 

 show the crack through which most of them enter the pantry or 

 the dining room, and then squirting in kerosene with a large 

 syringe through this crack will often stop the incursions ; or, the 

 crack may be packed with cotton soaked in kerosene, driving it 

 in with a table knife. 



Dr. William M. Wheeler has recently published some very 

 important studies of the peculiar ants of the family Poneridae, as 

 they occur in Texas (Biological Bulletin, Vol. II., No. i, October, 

 1900). These ants make rather primitive nests and they seem 

 to be generalized creatures from a socialistic standpoint. They 

 do not seem to feed one another like the specialized ants, but they 

 have the same habits regarding the cleanliness of the individuals 

 and of the nests. Their larvae differ from those of other ants, as 

 do their eggs. They are not nearly so prolific as are other ants 

 and the feeding habits of the larvae are very remarkable. The 

 workers capture another insect, cut it into pieces and scatter the 

 pieces among the larvae, which insert their long necks through 

 the cut surfaces, feeding upon the juices of the recently killed 

 insect. Dr. Wheeler found that there is no such sharp distinction 

 between the sterile and the fertile female with the Poneridae as 

 with the more specialized ants. He finds an irregular polymor- 

 phism in both sexes. The workers have the same habit of 

 opening the cocoons and drawing out the pupae which are ready 

 to transform. Ten or a dozen workers were observed to gather 

 around a prematurely extracted pupa and lick it for hours. 



One of the most interesting features of the study of ant colo- 



47 



