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Psyche 
[Vol. 89 
c-queen: An uninseminated, old, sterile female. The ovaries are 
short and contain no oocytes. The spermatheca, if present, is 
empty; but it may not be present. The wing muscles are degen- 
erate and have been replaced by fat body. (The term d-queen 
would denote a young dealate female which had not been 
inseminated. The reproductive organs resemble those of c- 
queens, but the wing muscles have not yet degenerated. We 
found no d-queens, probably because we performed our dissec- 
tions before the sexual brood had eclosed.) 
C-queen: An uninseminated, egg-laying female with ovarioles like 
those of an A-queen. Sometimes there is no spermatheca. In 
this paper, we report the occurrence of significant numbers of 
individuals of this type for the first time in Leptothoracine ants. 
However, they occur rather frequently in colonies of Formica 
polyctena Foerster (Ehrhardt 1970) and Monomorium pha- 
raonis (L.) (Petersen & Buschinger 1971). The origin of these 
females in nests of L. ambiguus, L. curvispinosus, and L. longi- 
spinosus is unclear. They may be old individuals which were 
once inseminated but whose supply of sperm has been ex- 
hausted. However, the existence of egg-layers with no sperma- 
theca indicates that insemination is not a necessary prerequisite 
for fertility. Recently U. Winter (personal communication) 
found that Harpagoxenus sublaevis males often transmit very 
little or no sperm during their first copulation. Thus, a queen 
which had mated only once with such a male might become 
fertile after receiving only the secretions of the males’s acces- 
sory glands. Perhaps a similar mechanism accounts for the 
existence of C-queens in these species of Leptothorax. 
The results of the dissections of queens of each species and of 
workers will be presented separately. 
1 . Leptothorax ambiguus 
A total of 88 dealate females from 30 multiple-queen colonies was 
dissected. Only about 1 /2 the multiple-queen nests contained more 
than one A-queen and were thus “truly polygynous” (see Table 5). 
Three of these truly polygynous nests also contained one or two 
b-queens and were thus in the process of developing polygyny to a 
higher degree. 
