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2.75 to 3.5 mm long; overall yellowish brown. The flattened antennae have only six segments [scape + five]; the two apical segments form a strong club. Mandibles darker brown with a strong apical tooth that appears worn away in older individuals. Small oblong eyes in front of the midline of the head. The alitrunk or thorax is box-like, the segments fused, and without any spines, but strongly grooved. The legs are extraordinary: the coxae of the middle and hind legs are enormously enlarged, as is the femur of the hind pair of legs. What’s more, the upper tarsus of each leg is greatly swollen, especially the middle and hind legs, and terminates in a ring of teeth or scales that resemble nothing so much as finger nails!
These thickened upper tarsi give the legs a bee-like appearance, hence the name, from the Greek melissa = honey bee, and tarsus = leg. Bizarrely, the ants walk with the fore- and hindlegs on the floor in the normal fashion, but with the central pair of legs walking on the ‘ceilings’ of their tunnels.
The ants are fairly hairy, with shorter and longer fine, long, pale yellow hairs.
Almost impossible to find, these extraordinarily bizarre little ants live under the bark and in the heartwood of living trees and shrubs, never emerging except perhaps to see off alate reproductives – males and females – on their way to mate and establish new nests. We were lucky to find some in a broken branch of their favourite host plant [in the Cape at least] - Leucospermum praemorsum. Sadly it was a very dark, rainy day and macrophotography was out of the question; the samples collected all died and curiously disintegrated before photos were taken. These drawings are reconstructed from our remnants and with a look at the [very distorted] specimens on AntWeb.
The ants seem to rely upon coccids - scale or mealy bugs - that they introduce into the shrubs, for their food. How the coccids get into the nests is unknown, but it seems possible that, just as in the case of the Yellow Forest Sugar ant [Acropyga arnoldi], a few coccids fly away attached to the hairs of the alate reproductives and so are present when the new colony starts.
These ants are true wood-borers [unlike the so-called ‘carpenter’ ants, the favoured common name for Camponotus in America] and it seems likely that the curious 'teeth' on the lower legs as well as the strong apical teeth on the mandibles are used in tunnel construction.
I have discovered that the ants have also been found in Maytenus oleoides, on the Pakhuis Pass, suggesting that they might inhabit a much wider range of plants than was previously thought.