Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/295

Rh to me by my friend Mr. E. Doubleday, I succeeded in taking twentytwo specimens; I should probably not have taken so many had I not, after capturing six or eight, found a pair in copulâ; I became anxious to take others, and succeeded in finding three pairs thus connected.

I have been an examiner of ants' nests, and an observer of their habits, some years, and have searched in scores of the nests of Formica flava for the Claviger, and this perhaps is the reason why I have not found it. In the immediate neighbourhood of London there are no stony fields like those in chalky districts like Mickleham, &c, and, where the soil is subject to retaining a greater degree of moisture, like the London clay, the ant appears to find it necessary to raise up a hillock like a mole-hill, to the upper chambers of which she conveys her larvae, eggs and pupae, as the atmospheric changes render it necessary; but, on the contrary, at Mickleham I did not observe a single instance of any superstructure being raised, for, in a soil so light as in some places barely to cover the strata of chalk, the ant is glad to find a situation so suited to her purpose as the underside of a large stone, for here the necessary degree of moisture for the development of her progeny is retained in the earth. Now it will be obvious that the difficulty of detecting the Claviger amongst the accumulations of the ant-hill must be very great, but on removing the stones you are at once, as it were, admitted into the channels of the nest, filled with eggs, larvae and pupae, and amongst these it is that Claviger is found.

The first question which naturally arises is this—what is the nature of the connexion between the two insects? P.W.J. Müller, in Germar's 'Magazin der Entomologie,' informs us that the ants altogether support the Clavigers, for the sake of a peculiar secretion which exudes from them, and which the ants suck from the two flocks of hair that terminate the external angles of the elytra,—that the ants occasionally caress the Clavigers, who then give out a fresh supply of the fluid,—that the Claviger is wholly dependant for support on the ants, who feed it with juices extracted from flowers, &c.

It is but reasonable to suppose that, as the Claviger is destitute of eyes, it would never of its own accord quit the nest; and I think the mode in which it becomes distributed will be best shown by what I shall relate of my own observations on another parasite or inhabitant of ants' nests. It must not be supposed, from what I have stated, that every nest contains Clavigers; that I am convinced is not the case, even in the neighbourhood where it has been found: nor can