Page:Harvesting ants and trap-door spiders. Notes and observations on their habits and dwellings (IA harvestingantstr00mogg).pdf/132

 to search I should have discovered more nests, and perhaps others which were still tenanted.

We now turn from the single-door nests to those with double doors, and from the well known to the new types of structure.

In these we have a thin and wafer-like door at the mouth of the nest, and from two to four inches lower down, a second and solid underground door. These lower doors are characteristic of the nests to which they belong, that of the branched nest (Nemesia meridionalis, Plate IX.) being long and more or less tongue-shaped, while that of the unbranched double-door nest (N. Eleanora, Plate XII. p. 106) is somewhat horse-shoe shaped.

The surface doors of these two kinds of nest do not appear to differ, and, though rather thinner, may be compared to those of the single-door wafer kind from Jamaica.

The commonest form at Mentone is the branched nest, which may be found in abundance in many of the loosely-built walls of the lemon and olive terraces or on sloping banks, but they are rarely to be met with on flat ground.

In the nests of Nemesia meridionalis the tube, instead of being simple, as it is in all other known nests, is invariably branched, a second tube joining the first at the point where the lower door is hung and forming with it an angle of about 45°. The main tube descends and is frequently curved, or sometimes doubly bent like the spout of a tea-kettle (A, Plate X. p. 100), while the branch ascends, and in some few instances reaches the surface, though it is usually a cul de sac (Plate IX.)