Ants in France
This article is an extract from a longer article published in the
April 1997 edition of The Magpie. Steve Brady tells about his visit, late last
summer, to France.
Last October some friends who have recently bought themselves a farmhouse in
the depths of the French countryside about 50 miles south of Poitiers invited me to stay with them for a week (actually
they invited me to manhandle a large and heavy box containing a PC and
ancillary equipment halfway across England and France by train, as a result of
which I needed a week to recover anyway!) In west-central France
about 60 miles from the Atlantic coast the area in which I was staying is
basically the temperate deciduous broad-leafed woodland, heavily modified by
agriculture, which surrounds our own dear Milton Keynes.
And in fact, apart from the virtual absence of hedges the gently rolling,
well-wooded countryside does not at first glance look much different from that
round here in, for example South Northamptonshire,
albeit the season was a few weeks less advanced toward winter than at the same
time of year here.
No sooner had I and my host family (on whom I hope I wasn’t too virulent a
parasite!) stepped outside the door for a walk on the morning after I arrived
than something of interest flew into view. Namely a polistine wasp, Polistes gallicus. These look like the vespine
wasps we all know and love, except that the “wasp waist” is longer and thinner.
But their colonies are much simpler and smaller, both physically and behaviourally. The nests themselves comprise little more
than a couple of dozen grey papier-mache cells
hanging upside down from a thin stalk. I didn’t find any in France but I have
seen nests of the Eastern American Polistes canadensis (which doesn’t actually occur in Canada - though
P.gallicus does in Gaul! )
hanging from roof eaves in Virginia and from the fascinating accounts of the
19th Century French entomologist J.H. Fabre (well
worth reading in translation if you haven’t already) the French species are
similar.
Polistes colonies consist of a few dozen adults at
most, rather than up to 2000 in our social wasp species (which can grow to tens
of thousands in Australasia where kind H.sapiens has freed them from constraints of winter and
natural enemies by considerately shipping European vespines
there). And the Polistes queen is just one of several
physically identical females founding the nest who is rewarded for being top of
the colony pecking (or nipping) order by being able to lay eggs not devoured by
the alpha female if found - remove her and the beta female becomes “queen”. In
our vespine species the single queen is
physiologically distinct and, unlike polistines, much
bigger than her worker daughters and sisters. The polistine
wasps I saw sunning themselves on vegetation would have been late-brood females
preparing to hibernate, as vespine queens do here. Polistes occurs as far north as Southern Sweden
in climates no warmer or longer in summer, and colder in winter, than in Britain.
So it probably could survive here, but never crossed the Channel.
Staying in the Order Hymenoptera, a number of ant species rare in Britain
occurred within a few minutes’ walk of where I was staying. The Jet-Black Ant Lasius fuliginosus is
sufficiently uncommon on this side of the Channel that if you find a colony the
Institute for Terrestrial Ecology at Monk’s Wood near Huntingdon would like you
to tell them where. This ant is notable for making its underground nests out of
black paper made like wasps’ nests from wood gnawed by workers, albeit instead
of combs what they build is a replica in paper of the tunnels and chambers dug
in soil by such close relatives as the Common Black Ant L. niger
and the Yellow Meadow Ants L. flavus and L. umbratus. The advantage is that paper is stronger and more
cohesive than soil so they can pack more corridors and chambers into the same
volume underground. L. fuliginosus is also noteworthy
in that its nests can be identified by a distinctive, sweetish and not
unpleasant, smell (perhaps the ITE could train a dog to find nests of this
species for it, just as they can be trained to sniff out drugs or explosives -
or, given that the nests are underground, perhaps retrain a truffle-hunting
pig!) It was quite abundant in the neighbourhood,
whilst I have only seen it twice this side of the Channel, once in Berkshire
and once in Pembrokeshire. As were small brown ants
of the genus Leptothorax, related to the common red
garden ant genus Myrmica. At some point I must borrow
the Society’s binocular dissecting microscope and key the specimens I brought
back to species. L. acervorum and nylanderi
are on the Bucks list though I have never found them here myself and they are
far from common. In France
I found a colony under bark in a rotting branch (which in Britain
would pretty certainly make it nylanderi, but there
are more species of the genus across the Channel) 50 yards from the farmhouse,
alas sans queen as I’d have liked to establish a nest in captivity back in Blakelands.
Finally, whilst waiting outside the village school to meet the host children
I saw something that over here would have been really noteworthy. Lots of ants
running about on a wall and an adjacent tree very similar to our common black
ant Lasius niger
but brown. So rare is, or was, this species, L. brunneus,
here that when at University in the 1970’s one of my tutors drove me to one of
its very few then recorded sites in Britain, where clearly it only wanted to
mix in the highest circles as it was on the Royal Estates at Windsor! This is
an example of a species then right on the northern edge of its range in Southern
England. It would be interesting to see, in the light of possible
global warming since then, whether this species is any more common here now.
But it certainly is still very rare here, and common in central France.
Where, incidentally, I didn’t see any of our very common L. niger.
Unfortunately - perhaps because it was already late in the season and they had
already entered hibernation - I didn’t find interesting French ants which we definitely
don’t get here such as the specialised slave-making
species Polyergus rufescens
and the very large Manica rubida.
Still, better luck next time!
Steve Brady.
Uploaded with permission of the author. Copyright © 1997.