42 
Psyche 
[June-September 
on yet another chemical releaser, a secretion of the mandi- 
bular glands of the harvesting ant Pogonomyrmex badius . 
This agent is especially interesting, because it operates 
to release two seemingly unrelated complex behavior pat- 
terns, general alarm behavior and digging. 
Materials 
Observations were made chiefly on colonies collected 
at Ocean Drive Beach, South Carolina, and Gulf Shores, 
Alabama, and maintained in artificial nests in the lab- 
oratory. Since the mother queens of Pogonomyrmex colonies 
are notoriously difficult to find in the field, a note on the 
collecting method employed would seem to be in order. 
The best results were obtained by excavating small nests 
during the early morning, preferably following rainfall. 
The upper portions of the nests were simply dug out with 
a spade and scattered over a ground-cloth until the queen 
was sighted. Under such conditions, roughly half the nests 
opened yielded queens during the first ten minutes of 
search. Other methods tried, including deep lateral ex- 
cavations and the use of sieves, proved relatively ineffi- 
cient. 
The colonies were housed in the laboratory in vertical, 
multistoried, plexiglas nests. The horizontal galleries were 
fitted with sliding plexiglas walls that could be moved 
to allow cleaning and to give access to the interior of the 
nest. The floors of the galleries were made of softwood 
strips. Curved plastic tubes led from the outside to the 
ends of the wooden floors to allow periodic watering of the 
nest interior. A single opening led from the bottom gallery 
outside to a walled foraging arena. The ants had been 
gradually habituated to strong light, so that it was possible 
at all times to keep the nest interior brightly illuminated. 
The foraging arena was illuminated during twelve hours of 
each day by fluorescent lamps turned on and off by an 
automatic timing device. A more detailed description of 
this type of artificial nest, which has proven successful in 
the pursuit of a variety of behavioral problems, is planned 
in a later report. During the present study, the adult 
population of the captive colonies ranged between 63 and 
124, which is smaller than that of large juvenile and 
adult colonies in the wild. 
