134 
Psyche 
[June 
rapidly from i 8 .i°C in April to 22 . 4 0 in May, 27 . 6 °* in June and 
30. 1 0 in July (Sellers, ’60). 
Light (’37) reported alates in colonies in California from late 
October into November and in Nevada during May. Snyder ( 54) 
noted that alates were taken from a colony in Texas in mid-April. 
In the absence of flight records from these regions speculation is 
unprofitable, although flight schedules are probably shifted in con- 
formity with local weather patterns which result from altitudinal 
and latitudinal differences over its entire range. 
Once alates are present in a colony, the influence of biological 
factors on the initiation of flights must also be considered. Although 
the behavioral interactions among the members of a colony have 
only begun to be fathomed, the feverish activity exhibited within a 
colony at the onset of conditions favoring flight has probably been 
noted many times (e.g., in Kalotermes [= Incisitermes ] minor Hagen 
by Harvey, ’34, p. 221). In this connection some early attempts 
were made to induce flights from a large sub-colony which had been 
in the laboratory for about a month. It was confined in an observa- 
tion nest of seven plastic petri dishes interconnected with polyethylene 
Figure 1 . Flight season of Paraneotermes simplicicornis in relation to 
rainfall, weekly mean temperature and relative humidity at Tucson, Arizona, 
in 1962. Dates showing 0.1" actually indicate amounts from a trace to 0.1" 
of rain. Flights began when mean temperature remained above about 23°C. 
The upper section shows the numbers of alates observed on each date during 
the flight season from June 9 to Sept. 7. 
