Book Description

Excerpt from Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation, Vol. 34: January to December, 1922 The very long hot summer and the drought of 1921, made it a very poor year for Ants in England; nearly all the species burying themselves much deeper than usual in the ground. The entire failure of many species of Aphids during part of the summer also had a marked effect upon the Formicidae. My colleague Mr. Crawley tells me that he was informed of several cases of ants entering dwellings this year, where they had never done so before. I also heard of similar occurrences, and we are both agreed to attribute this to the lack of plant-lice. Some ants, as we shall see later, had their marriage-flights quite a month earlier than is usual with them. Formica sangninea, which always goes down for the winter sooner than our other species of Formica, disappeared still earlier than usual this year. Formicidae. Ponera punctatissima, Roger. - My friend, Mr. Philip Harwood, sent several winged females and workers of this rare little ant to me to name. In Harwood's locality also, no houses are anywhere near, nor is there a refuse heap, or anything to suggest the ants had been introduced. Myrmecina graminicola, Latr. - In my last year's notes I recorded that no winged females had been reared for the first time for four years in my observation nest of this little species, which I have now had in my possession for over eleven years. I suggested that the lighting, which took place between the ants in 1919, might have caused this, and that as no fighting to speak of had occurred in 1920, winged females might be produced again in 1921. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."