One day I fortunately chanced to witness a migration from one nest to
another, and it was a most interesting spectacle to behold the masters
carefully carrying, as Huber has described, their slaves in their
jaws. Another day my attention was struck by about a score of the
slave-makers haunting the same spot, and evidently not in search of
food; they approached and were vigorously repulsed by an independent
community of the slave species (F. fusca); sometimes as many as three
of these ants clinging to the legs of the slave-making F. sanguinea.
The latter ruthlessly killed their small opponents, and carried their
dead bodies as food to their nest, twenty-nine yards distant; but they
were prevented from getting any pupae to rear as slaves. I then dug up
a small parcel of the pupae of F. fusca from another nest, and put
them down on a bare spot near the place of combat; they were eagerly
seized, and carried off by the tyrants, who perhaps fancied that,
after all, they had been victorious in their late combat.
At the same time I laid on the same place a small parcel of the pupae
of another species, F. flava, with a few of these little yellow ants
still clinging to the fragments of the nest. This species is
sometimes, though rarely, made into slaves, as has been described by
Mr. Smith. Although so small a species, it is very courageous, and I
have seen it ferociously attack other ants. In one instance I found to
my surprise an independent community of F.
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