race of our honey bees, which is indisposed to sting—­and such praise is still expressed at the peripatetic gatherings of German bee-masters—­is therefore from a practical point of view a false praise.  Now we understand also why the stingless honey bees of South America collect little honey.  It is well known that never more than a very small store of honey is found in felled trees inhabited by stingless Melipona.  What should induce the Melipona to accumulate stores which they could not preserve?  They lack formic acid.  Only three of the eighteen different known species of honey bees of northern Brazil have a sting.  A peculiar phenomenon in the life of certain ants has always been problematical, but now it finds also its least forced explanation.  It is well known that there are different grain-gathering species of ants.  The seeds of grasses and other plants are often preserved for years in their little magazines, without germinating.  A very small red ant, which drags grains of wheat and oats into its dwellings, lives in India.  These ants are so small that eight or twelve of them have to drag on one grain with the greatest exertion.  They travel in two separate ranks over smooth or rough ground, just as it comes, and even up and down steps, at the same regular pace.  They have often to travel with their booty more than a thousand meters, to reach their communal storehouse.  The renowned investigator Moggridge repeatedly observed that when the ants were prevented from reaching their magazines of grain, the seeds begun to sprout.  The same was the case in abandoned magazines of grain.  Hence the ants know how to prevent the sprouting of the grains, but the capacity for sprouting is not destroyed.  The renowned English investigator John Lubbock, who communicates this and similar facts in his work entitled “Ants, Bees, and Wasps,” adds that it is not yet known in what way the ants prevent the sprouting of the collected grains.  But now it is demonstrated that here also it is only the formic acid, whose preservative influence goes so far that it can make seed incapable of germination for a determinate time or continuously.

It may be mentioned that we have also among us a species of ant which lives on seeds, and stores these up.  This is our Lasius niger, which carries seeds of Viola into its nests, and, as Wittmack has communicated recently to the Sitzungsberichte der gesellschaft naturforschender freunde zu Berlin, does the same with the seeds of Veronica hederaefolia.

Syke states in his account of an Indian ant, Pheidole providens, that this species collects a great store of grass-seeds.  But he observed that the ants brought their store of grain into the open air to dry it after the monsoon storms.  From this it appears that the preservative effect of the formic acid is destroyed by great moisture, and hence this drying process.  So that among the bees the honey which is stored for winter use, and among the ants the stores of grain which serve for food, are preserved by one and the same fluid, formic acid.