United States or Vatican City ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I have sometimes come across the migratory columns. They may easily be known by all the common workers moving in one direction, many of them carrying the larvae and pupae carefully in their jaws. Here and there one of the light-coloured officers moves backwards and forwards directing the columns. Such a column is of enormous length, and contains many thousands, if not millions of individuals.
I then dug up a small parcel of the pupae of F. fusca from another nest, and put them down on a bare spot near the place of combat; they were eagerly seized and carried off by the tyrants, who perhaps fancied that, after all, they had been victorious in their late combat.
They advance in a long column live or six deep, while thinner columns forage on either flank, till they arrive at a mass of rotten wood abounding in insect larvae, when they surround it, and do not again move forward till every particle of food has been carried off! When they discover a wasp's nest, they attack the papery covering to get at the larvae pupae and newly-hatched wasps.
One minute she was crying wildly, that here was a big one, the next she was reaching for a limb above her head or on her knees overturning dead leaves under a hickory or oak tree, or working aside black muck with her bare hands as she searched for buried pupae cases. For the first hour Pete bent back bushes and followed, carrying what Elnora discovered. Then he found one.
At the same time I laid on the same place a small parcel of the pupae of another species, F. flava, with a few of these little yellow ants still clinging to the fragments of their nest. This species is sometimes, though rarely, made into slaves, as has been described by Mr. Smith. Although so small a species, it is very courageous, and I have seen it ferociously attack other ants.
If their presence proved useful to the species which had seized them if it were more advantageous to this species, to capture workers than to procreate them the habit of collecting pupae, originally for food, might by natural selection be strengthened and rendered permanent for the very different purpose of raising slaves.
There are a few Anthrax grubs beside the remains of pupae not far removed from the final metamorphosis; there are others, but very rarely, on Mason bees already in the perfect state. These grubs are sickly and appear to be ailing; the provisions are too solid and do not lend themselves to the delicate suckling of the worms.
We do not succeed in finding one single nymph of the Halictus. The whole of the populous city has perished; and its place has been taken by the Gnat. There is a glut of that individual's pupae. I collect them in order to trace their evolution. The year runs its course; and the little russet kegs, into which the original maggots have hardened and contracted, remain stationary.
The moth proved this theory correct by soon going out naturally. Choice could be made in all that plethora, and a male and female of most perfect colouring and markings were selected, for my studies of a pair. One male was mounted and a very large female on account of her size. That completed my Imperialis records from eggs to caterpillars, pupae and moths.
Many were bringing along pieces of the ant-food from the old to the new nests; others carried the undeveloped white pupae and larvae. It was a wholesale and entire migration; and the next day the formicarium down which I had last poured the carbolic acid was entirely deserted. I afterwards found that when much disturbed, and many of the ants destroyed, the survivors migrate to a new locality.
Word Of The Day