6 BULLETIN 377, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, 
/ 
and started to wash off the ants. It took us nearly an hour and a half to get 
the last ant off the baby. I feel sure that if we had not heard the ery, in a few 
hours the child would have perished. 
With conditions made almost intolerable in badly infested places, 
it is not uncommon to find empty, unrentable houses. Realty values 
accordingly drop. 
The nurseryman ana truck grower are greatly molested by this 
pest, owing to the ant’s fondness for the honeydew of aphids and 
scale insects. The ants take the best possible care of these honey- 
yielding species, and protect them from their natural enemies, fre- 
quently building mud shelters over them, and as the host plants 
grow, carry the young scales and aphids and place them on the 
young tender growth, where they may more easily sap the juices 
of the plants. 
~ Newell and Barber? give a very graphic account of the manner 
in which the Argentine ant has invaded the orange orchards of 
Louisiana. 
In corn, cotton, and sugar-cane fields the Argentine ant when 
present is constantly attending the aphids and mealy bugs, increasing 
the numbers of these species to an alarming degree, much to the 
detriment of the plants. The writer has determined that a consider- 
able loss of sugar results from the attendance of the Argentine ant 
on the sugar-cane mealy bug. 
HABITS. 
Argentine ants are extremely social among their own kind, the 
individuals never having been observed to quarrel with one another, 
nor one colony with another. Workers may be carried for miles and 
placed with others of their kind and no apparent demonstrations 
of like or dislike are exhibited. The newcomers appear to enter 
into the colony spirit and are soon lost to the view of an observer. 
Any small nest will contain several queens which live together 
amicably. 
The summer nest may be located anywhere—under sidewalks, 
under the sills of houses, in brick piles, stone piles, under a piece of 
board or a piece of tin, in an old tin can—in fact, in any place con- 
venient to the food supply. In the winter months there is a tendency 
to concentrate into larger colonies, and they seek warm, dry, secure 
nesting places in which to hibernate. These desirable places are not 
plentiful, and where one is located the ants from some distance will 
seek its shelter. The winter is the most hazardous period of the year, 
for should a nest by any chance be flooded during a cold spell, when 
the ants are dormant, the chances of survival of the colony would be 
extremely slight. Usually throughout the latter part of December, 
1 Op. cit., p. 24. 
i 
