58 
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 
colony have lost all interest in them from the moment of 
their return, and trouble themselves no more about them, 
for they well know that the males have now fulfilled their 
vocation. 5 The great majority of the fertilised females 
share the same fate as the males. But a small proportion 
find concealment in holes, which they either dig for them- 
selves, or happen to find ready made, and there found a 
new colony. The first thing they do is to pull off their 
now useless wings, by scratching and twisting them, one 
after the other, with the clawed ends of their feet. They 
then lay their eggs, and become the queens of new 
colonies. 
Forel says that no fertilised female ever returns to her 
original home; but that the workers keep back a certain 
number of females w T hich are fertilised before the swarming 
takes place ; in this case the workers pull off the wings 
of the fertilised females. The majority of observers, how- 
ever, maintain that some of the females composing the 
swarm return to their native home to become mothers 
where they had been children. Probably both statements 
are correct. A writer in the 4 Grroniger Deekblad 5 for 
June 16, 1877, observes tt)it, looking to the injurious 
effects of in-breeding, the facts as related by Forel are less 
probable than those related by other observers, and that, if 
they actually occur, the females fertilised before flight are 
probably kept by the ants as a sort of 4 reserve corps to 
which the workers resort only in case of need, and if they 
fail to secure any returning queens. 5 
Nursing . — The eggs will not develop into larvae un- 
less nursed. The nursing is effected by licking the 
surface of the eggs, which under the influence of this 
process increase in size, or grow. In about a fortnight, 
during which time the workers carry the eggs from higher 
to lower levels of the nest, and vice versa , according to the 
circumstances of heat, moisture, &c., the larvae are hatched 
out, and require no less careful nursing than the eggs. 
The workers feed them by placing mouths together and re- 
gurgitating food stored up in the crop or proventriculus 
into the intestinal tract of the young. The latter show 
their hunger by 4 stretching out their little brown heads. 
