1982] Alloway, Buschinger, Talbot, Stuart & Thomas 
263 
Certain pertinent facts about each experiment are contained in 
Table 10. 
The most frequent result for nests which had been close together 
in nature was so-called “fusion”. After a day or two, the ants from 
the different nests peacefully moved into one of the artificial nests 
and remained there indefinitely. We are not sure why fusion 
occurred so frequently in the laboratory. One factor may have been 
that our artificial nests are somewhat larger than the average acorn. 
In any case, these peaceful mergers suggest that the ants from adja- 
cent nests were members of the same colony and are thus compati- 
ble with the polydomy hypothesis. 
Other experiments (e.g. L. ambiguus experiments 9, 10, and 23 
and L. longispinosus experiment 5) supported the polydomy hy- 
pothesis more dramatically. The ants continued to occupy more 
than one nest among which they maintained a more or less contin- 
ual exchange of workers, brood, and queens. Thus, over a period of 
several days, a nest was sometimes polygynous, sometimes monog- 
ynous, and sometimes queenless. In other experiments, (e.g. L. 
ambiguus experiments 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22, 24), it appeared that we 
observed interactions between two polydomous colonies or between 
a polydomous and a monodomous colony. For example, in experi- 
ments 15 and 16, we had examples of four nests which had been 
found in two close pairs separated by a somewhat greater distance. 
The ants from each pair of nests quickly fused, but there was pro- 
longed fighting among the ants from the different pairs of nests. 
The results of the control experiments also supported the poly- 
domy hypothesis. Ants from nests not found close together in 
nature did not usually coexist peacefully. When nests from different 
parts of the same collection site or from different sites were placed 
near one another, the result was usually widespread and protracted 
fighting. However, we observed two exceptions to this rule. In L. 
ambiguus experiment 19, 3 nests which had been an average of 
96 cm apart in nature were placed together in a 2025-cm 2 arena. 
There was no fighting; and after 12 days, the ants from two queen- 
right nests which had been 1 18 cm apart in nature peacefully moved 
into one nest. Even more surprising was the fusion of ants in two 
queenright nests from different collection sites which we observed in 
L. ambiguus experiment 18. We cannot explain these anomalous 
results, although we speculate that these species have a limited 
