474 Insects. 



living or dead inseet which falls in their way. It requiring a good amount of food to 

 satisfy the wants of such numbers, the ants are kept so active that they appear never 

 to rest during the day-time. I have often seen many of their nests about noon, pre- 

 sent such an excited and tumultuous appearance, from the number of ants covering 

 their surfaces, that it could only be compared, as Huber correctly describes it, " to a 

 liquid in a state of ebullition." The influence exerted by these ants in diminishing 

 the abundance of other insects, mollusks, and even the smaller animals in this wood, 

 is very great, as I always experience when entomologizing there. For although many 

 good captures may be made on the borders of the wood, scarcely any insects but ants 

 can be found beneath its shade. The pairing or swarming takes place from the end 

 of July to the beginning of September; and during these months the boughs and shrubs 

 are covered with the winged males and females, which about dusk on fine evenings fly 

 in swarms, and cause so great an annoyance by their venomous bitings to the fairer 

 sex of the parties of pleasure who have tea and dancing in the woods, as prematurely 

 to put a stop to their amusements, and drive them from its precincts. The insects and 

 larva? of these nests furnish a good supply of food to the pheasant and partridge, many 

 of which I have watched scratching off the covering of the nest to arrive at the larvae. 

 The size of the neuter ant varies from 3 to b\ lines, the stretch of the posterior pair of 

 legs is as great as 8 lines : sometimes they have a black spot on the upper surface of 

 the thorax and scales. There are only two other localities on Charn wood-forest where 

 I have met with this species. In the Out-woods there is a very large nest, and in 

 Sheat-hedges wood there is also one ; and though I have observed this last for several 

 years, I have never seen it swarm, or known of another colony in its neighbourhood. 

 — J. Plant, Curator to the Leicester Philosophical Society's Museum. 



Note on the scarcity of Wasps last summer. Writing of last summer, Mr. Smith 

 asks — " What became of the wasps, the true Vespidae ? " (Zool. 408). Their history 

 during the last two summers, in reference to this part of Scotland, is not a little sin- 

 gular. In the spring of 1842 they appeared in their ordinary numbers ; but, owing to 

 the weather, most propitious for warmth and dryness, they multiplied before the au- 

 tumn season in a most surprising and unwonted manner. The whole country seemed 

 to swarm with them. In many places, particularly in the vicinity of woods, the hives 

 of the honey-bee were plundered and destroyed : every sort of fruit was attacked and 

 eaten by them, not even hard and juiceless pears escaping. In a newspaper notice it 

 was stated that they had become so voracious, that some fish, hanging to dry in a 

 house in Forres, were devoured, all save the bones. The wasps so infested the woods 

 that the wood-cutters, in some instances, gave up work, and in others, as at Cawdor, 

 were obliged to use gauze coverings for their faces, to protect them from the stings 

 when a tree fell and roused the angry insects from their nests. In the spring of last 

 year (1843) the wasps appeared at the usual time, in far greater numbers however than 

 before ; but, numerous as they were, they were only in proportion to the swarms that 

 existed in the autumn. Dreading that by summer, if they increased as in the preced- 

 ing year, the country would scarcely be habitable on account of them, many people set 

 about killing them by every means in their power, concluding that the destruction of 

 one wasp in spring was the prevention of a whole colony in summer. But all the ar- 

 tificial means resorted to for diminishing their numbers would have been of little avail, 

 had not a tract of severe weather providentially set in during six weeks in May and 

 June. The long-continued cold of that period, the easterly winds and rains, reduced 

 the number of wasps so much that comparatively few were to be seen throughout the 



