Wasps, Bees, and Ants 
537 
lacking in knowledge concerning the exact mode or modes of the estab¬ 
lishment and beginning life of new colonies. Whether after the mating 
flight a fertilized queen unaccompanied by workers can found a new com¬ 
munity, or whether such fertilized queens are found after they come to 
the ground and remove their wings and are taken charge of by a group 
of workers which then take the queen into an already existing community 
or with her establish a new one; or whether, as seems probable, most of 
these modes of procedure are repre¬ 
sented in the life-history of various differ¬ 
ent ant species—all these questions are 
by no means well answered on a basis 
of careful observation and experimenta¬ 
tion. Most of the observations which 
have been made on the founding of new 
communities seem to show that a fertil¬ 
ized queen begins alone the establish¬ 
ment of a new community by building a Fig. 742.—Soldier and worker of Phei- 
little nest, laying a few eggs, caring for larged ) v 
the hatching larvae herself, and thus 
raising by her unaided exertions a small brood of neuter workers which 
are always normally undersized, probably from insufficient nourishment. 
This mode of community founding is just like that obtaining among 
the social wasps and the bumblebees. Leidy and Comstock have ob¬ 
served such a mode of founding new colonies by the common carpenter- 
ant of the East, Camponotus pennsylvanicus , and in Europe Myrmica 
mginodis, Camponotus ligniperdus , and Lasius alienus have been noted 
to follow the same procedure. An interesting fact in these cases is that 
the food given the larvae by the queen is supplied from her own body, 
by regurgitation through the mouth, no food whatever being brought into 
the nest from the time that the queen first begins to lay eggs until this first 
brood is matured. Wheeler, whose admirable recent studies of American 
ants have revealed many important and intensely interesting facts in the 
life of our American ant communities, finds among the Ponerine species, 
undoubtedly in most respects the least specialized of the ants, that the colonies, 
all of which are small, “ appear to be annual growths, formed by swarming 
as in the bees, and not by single fertilized female ants unaccompanied by 
workers.” 
The workers of the first brood begin immediately to take on themselves 
the work of the little community, the queen from now on having only to pro¬ 
duce eggs. First of all comes the enlarging of the nest. Ants’ nests, com¬ 
prising a sum of irregular chambers and galleries, are mostly built under¬ 
ground, although some have a considerable part above the normal ground 
