Host Specificity in Colony‐Founding by Polyergus Lucidus Queens (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

The pine barrens of eastern Long Island in Suffolk County, New York, provide a unique habitat for the obligatory slave-making species Polyergus lucidus Mayr. Here, four species of Formica, belonging to the pallidefulva species group, are used by Polyergus as slaves, although only one slave species is usually found in a single Polyergus nest. This is in contrast to related facultative slavemakers of the genus Formica belonging to the sanguinea species group, found in the same habitat, whose nests commonly contain two or more species serving as slaves. Choice of a host species can occur both through the colony-founding behavior of queens and through the choice of target nests for slave raids. The parasitic Polyergus queens found colonies either by adoption, where a queen invades the nest of a slave species, killing the resident queen and appropriating workers and brood present (Wheeler, 1910), or by "budding", in which a queen invades or is accepted into a host species nest accompanied by workers from her nest of origin (Marlin, 1968). This experiment reports the results of a study designed to determine whether the choice of host species by a parasitic queen is influenced by her past experience. It was hypothesized that a newlymated Polyergus queen would choose and/or be chosen by a colony of the same host species found in her nest of origin.