Page:Harvesting ants and trap-door spiders. Notes and observations on their habits and dwellings (IA harvestingantstr00mogg).pdf/34

 the other red-headed; Atta structor, a creature very similar to barbara, but of a claret-brown colour; and a minute yellow ant, the large workers of which have gigantic heads, named Pheidole (or Atta) megacephala.

My renewed observations at Mentone were carried on from October, 1871, to May, 1872, and I was able during that interval to become a frequent visitor to a warm and sheltered valley, which lay but a few minutes' walk from the house in which I lived, and in which thirty nests of the most active of the seed-storing ants were to be found.

Full therefore of my intention to resolve this difficulty if possible, I set out on October 29, 1871, immediately after my return to Mentone, to revisit this valley, where, in the previous May, I had seen the ants busily engaged in cutting, carrying, and sorting their harvest.

The spot in question was a rough slope of soft sandstone rock, with accumulations of sandy soil in the hollows, covered with a sparse and scrubby vegetation, composed of Cistus (C. salvifolius), pot-*herb thyme, black lavender (Lavandula stæchas), spiny broom (Calycotome spinosa), overshadowed here and there by a few scattered stone and maritime pines, and intermixed with coarse grasses and some smaller plants.

Cultivated lemon terraces lay on the edge of the wild ground lower down in the valley, and at this season, as also in the late spring, these terraces were overgrown with a rank crop of weeds, most of which were in seed.

I had scarcely set foot on the garrigue, as this kind of wild ground is called, to distinguish it from