Banded sugar ant meat ants, which have been observed blocking banded sugar ant nesting holes with pebbles and soil to prevent them from leaving their nest during the early hours of the day. The ants counter this by preventing meat ants from leaving their nest by blocking their nesting holes with debris, a behaviour known as nest-plugging. If meat ant nests are encroached by trees or other shade, banded sugar ants may invade and take over the nest, since the health of the colony may deteriorate from overshadowing. Members of an affected meat ant colony later move to a nearby satellite nest that
Ant mimicry call of ants so they can integrate themselves into the nest. In "A. dentatis" the tubercles release the mimicking pheromone which elicits "A. caprensis" to care for the mimics as they would their own brood. In these relationships worker ants give the same preference to the Lycaenid's as they do to their own brood, demonstrating that chemical signals produced by the mimic are indistinguishable to the ant. This process is also used by larvae of the European Lycaenid species "Phengaris rebeli" which live in the nests of "Myrmica" ants and feed on their ant brood. Wasmannian mimicry occurs when two