. Ants; their structure, development and behavior. Santschis expression,by a number of Monomorium workers, which tug at her legs andantenna- and sometimes draw her into the galleries. At other timesshe may he seen to dart into the nest entrance suddenly, so thatshe is arrested within the nest itself. There are no signs of anger onthe part of the Monomorium and she is soon able to move about in thegalleries without restraint. The workers forthwith feed and adopther. In the course of a few days she begins to lay eggs which arereceived and cared for by the Monomorium workers. Santschi observedtha
. Ants; their structure, development and behavior. Santschis expression,by a number of Monomorium workers, which tug at her legs andantenna- and sometimes draw her into the galleries. At other timesshe may he seen to dart into the nest entrance suddenly, so thatshe is arrested within the nest itself. There are no signs of anger onthe part of the Monomorium and she is soon able to move about in thegalleries without restraint. The workers forthwith feed and adopther. In the course of a few days she begins to lay eggs which arereceived and cared for by the Monomorium workers. Santschi observedthat the colonies infested with llhcclcriclla were usually of small size,had an impoverished appearance and lacked queens of the host species,and he was able to account for these peculiar conditions. The IVhccl- ericlla queen pays no at-tention to the much largerMonomorium queen, butthis insect isassassinatedby her own workers andthe parasitic queen isadopted in her believes that thissingular perversion of in-stinct is due to the prefer-. ence of the workers fora smaller fertile indivi-dual, just as the Tctra-morium workers preferto rear the small malesand females of Strongy-lognathus instead of theirown bulky sexual explanation is notvery satisfactory, how-ever, for, as we haveseen, the huge mother Tetramorium is retained in the nest, whereasit is precisely this individual that is destroyed in the infested Mono-morium colonies. Hence there must be some other reason for theassassination of the host queen by her own progeny. 2. andrci and creticus.—These ants have been recentlydescribed by Emery (19080), the former from females taken betweenJaffa and Jerusalem in a nest of Monomorium venustum, and originallyreferred to this species by Ern. Andre (18816), the latter from a single FIG. 276. Wheelericlla santschii of Tunis ; female(Original.) THE DEGENERATE SLAVE-MAKERS. 497 male taken in Crete. As both species are related to Wheeleriellasaiitscliii
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectants, bookyear1910
