barbara attending on or searching for aphides and the like. These captives took part of a small quantity of honey which I placed in the nest, but displayed no eagerness about it, and soon neglected and allowed it to be covered up with earth thrown out from the nest.
The ants work very frequently at night during the dark,[1] and this is the case in the wild as well as in the captive nests. A friend, at my request twice visited a nest of structor ants in the garden of an hotel at Mentone, when it was quite dark (in March, between seven and eight o'clock P.M.) and no moon, but the light of a candle showed that the workers, both large and small, were busily engaged in carrying into the nest seeds which had been purposely scattered in their neighbourhood. I have myself seen Pheidole megacephala similarly engaged at about nine P.M. on a warm night in April, when it was perfectly dark, not even the stars showing; but in this case the ants were collecting from the weeds in the garden. On the same occasion I also observed long and active trains of Formica emarginata [a rather small dusky ant, with a yellow thorax], making for the orange-trees in search of cocci and aphides, just as if it were broad day.
Before leaving Mentone, on May 1, I turned out this second captive nest, and found that the colony appeared perfectly healthy, and did not seem to have diminished materially in numbers. The queen ant and the larvæ seemed to be in just the same state as when they were taken. The earth in the lower part of the jar was honeycombed with galleries, granaries,
- ↑ This bears out the much-questioned assertion of Aristotle, though he only claimed that ants work "by night when the moon is at the full."—Hist. Anim., lib. ix. cap. xxvi.
