Ant

“ One ant she seemed to see oftener than others—a female ant with long hair that it did up, standing in front of the mirror and coiling it anxiously about its round, black head, peering in the glass for wrinkles. Sometimes this ant grew sad and seated herself to weep, digging her long black feelers into her unhappy eyes. ”

“ A Carrion-Crow, whom I met, pointed out the government of the ants as a suitable model, so you may understand how eager I was to study their system, and discover their secrets. On my way I fell in with scores of ants travelling for pleasure. They were all of them black and glossy, as if newly varnished, but utterly devoid of individuality, being all alike. After, indeed, one has seen a single ant, one knows all the others. They travel coated with a liquid which keeps them clean. Should one meet an ant in his mountains, on the water, or in his city-dwelling, his get-up is irreproachable. ”

“ Often likewise the ant carries forth her eggs from her secret chambers along her narrow trodden path, and a vast rainbow drinks, and leaving their feeding-ground in long column armies of rooks crowd with flapping wings. ”

“ You have seen the little ant-houses many a time on the garden-path, and all the ants at work, carrying grains of sand in their mouths, and running this way and that, as if they were busy in the most important work. Oh, the little ants are very wise! They seem to know how to contrive great things and are never idle. ”

“ In these tiny ant-hills we see above ground
Small buildings of full twenty stories are found,
Supported by pillars and walls.
What wonderful instinct these creatures display
In the care of their young on a damp rainy day,
As they run from one room to another!
And up stairs and down stairs they hasten again,
As each little ant, to be kept from the rain,
Must be carried up stairs by its mother.
When the clouds are dispersed, again they must run,
These delicate ants could not bear the hot sun ”

“ The ant soon reappears, but clearly feels it impossible to drag the bud up such a precipice, and runs away on some other quest. What did he want with that bud, I wonder? was it for food, or bric-a-brac, or a plaything for the babies? Never mind,—I shall never know, and I prepare to read again. But what's this? Here is my ant returning, and accompanied by some friends. They disappear in the canon, helpfulness and interest in every wave of their feelers. Their heads come into sight again, and—yes! they have the bud. ”

“ And the miraculous feature of it all is that beneath those slender stalks live miniature plants and myriads of insects whose existence, seen at such close quarters, reveals all its mysteries to you. An ant, staggering like a woodcutter under his burden, drags a piece of bark larger than himself ”

“ It takes a number of such domes to raise a brood of partridges. For this was an ant's nest. The old one stepped on top, looked about a moment, then gave half a dozen vigorous rakes with her daws, The friable ant-hill was broken open, and the earthen galleries scattered in ruins down the slope. The ants swarmed out and quarreled with each other for lack of a better plan. ”

“ True ants of many kinds and of interesting habits, including "the notorious and vicious red ant," flourish in great numbers. Beetles, of many species, some of brilliant colouring, some of amazing size, are as the sands of the sea for multitude. ”

“ Ants in great quantities and of many varieties of size and colour, from the lion ant, an inch long, to the small brown ant, which can insinuate itself into the most minute crevice. These seize upon whatever is eatable, and devour it in a short time. The ground seems alive with white ants, and the trees swarm with them inside and out; every thing here teems with life. ”

“ The Great Ant-eater has a curved head which is drawn out into a slender snout, no teeth, a long, slender tongue, a great bushy tail, and claws that neither allow the creature to burrow in the earth nor climb into trees, but which are admirably adapted to tear an ant-hill into fragments. ”

“ The time of change is at hand, and snug within the ant’s head and its own last larval skin, which, as is the way with fly caterpillars, serves it in lieu of a cocoon, the fortunate little creature turns into a chrysalis, and dreams away its time till, on some sunny day, it issues from its cradle a happy, active fly, feeling strangely attracted by ants. ”

“ At last we reached the great queen ant, the mother of millions of her race, a most enormous personage to be sure, nearly four inches long, and as thick as a man's finger, with a head not larger than that of a bee, but a body such as I have described, filled with eggs, which continually rolled out like a fluid from a reservoir. ”

“ On some days not a single white ant is to be seen abroad; and on others, and during certain hours, they appear out of doors in myriads, and work with extraordinary zeal and energy in carrying bits of dried grass down into their nests. ”

“ SINCE the earliest recorded observations of insect-life, the ant has been a subject of especial comment and wonderment. Found throughout the range of both temperate and the torrid zones, it is in the tropics that the most interesting species abound, and where their vast numbers and their industry and fearless pertinacity make them a veritable scourge. ”

“ Towards the end of the rainy season the white ant attains its perfect form, and on a still, warm evening, generally after a shower of rain, a wonderful sight presents itself when the perfect winged insects issue forth in countless myriads from the ground. ”

“ The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime. ”

“ The wings of your ant have been cut off, or unhooked, as you shall hear by and by.
There are many families of ants. Each has its own name and its own ways. All ants are very wise in their actions. I shall tell you many strange things about them. Ants have always been called “the wise insects.” Would you not like to learn about their homes, their children, and their way of life?
Before you study the ants in any book, I wish you would go out into your garden or into the fields. Find an ant-hill, and sit or lie by it for an hour or so. Take some sugar or bits of cake to feed the ants. ”

“ Peal has also recorded that an ant—the name is not mentioned, but it may be presumed to be an Assamese species—makes a concerted noise loud enough to be heard by a human being at twenty or thirty feet distance, the sound being produced by each ant scraping the horny apex of the abdomen three times in rapid succession on the dry, crisp leaves of which the nest is usually composed. ”

“ Periodically the master Ants, if we may so call them, set off{410} on a slave-hunting expedition. They find out the nest of the special Ant whose aid they need, penetrate into it, and bear off the pupæ, or “ants’ eggs,” as they are popularly called. These are carried to their new home, and are speedily hatched. They know no other home, and, led by instinct, set to work as industriously as if they had never been removed. ”

“ It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely overrated bird. During many summers, now, I have watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one. I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about religion. ”

“ Each ant, then, recognizes its own brothers and sisters, its mother, its mother’s sisters, and the children of its mother’s sisters, who are its cousins. All these have the familiar smell, and the ant treats them as friends. ”

“ He does not mention the ant, but throughout his allusions the ant is continually being brought before my mind, in its sleepless activity, in its intelligence and social organisation, in its structure, and more particularly in the fact that it displays, in addition to the two forms, the male and the female form, that almost all other animals possess, a number of other sexless creatures, workers, soldiers, and the like, differing from one another in structure, character, power, and use, and yet all members of the same species. ”

“ On the third year after I had noticed the attendance of the ants on my passion-flower, I found that the glands were not so well looked after as before, and soon discovered that a number of scale-insects had established themselves on the stems, and that the ants had in a great measure transferred their attentions to them. An ant would stand over a scale-insect and stroke it alternately on each side with its antennae, whereupon every now and then a clear drop of honey would exude from a pore on the back of the latter and be imbibed by the ant. ”

“ The habit in question consists in the ants transporting one another from place to place. The carrying ant seizes her comrade by the middle, and hurries along with it held aloft—the ant which is carried remaining quite motionless with all her legs drawn together. ”

“ To study in detail the manner in which this alarm spreads over the ant-hill, we must extend our observations to the individuals of the largest species: the Herculean Ants, who inhabit hollow trees and who quit them only in the spring, to accompany the males and females, have very much assisted me in this object. ”

“ In that region of the world the leaf-cutting ants present a very characteristic appearance as the column proceeds homewards, each ant carrying a piece of leaf held vertically in its jaws; and a homopterous insect has been found that faithfully resembles an ant bearing its burden. ”

“ A more remarkable sight even than an ant-bridge is perhaps an ant-nest, by which I mean, not an ants’ nest in the ordinary sense of the term, but a nest made of ants. The following quotation from the much-containing Naturalist in Nicaragua, page 25, will explain this hard saying. “They make their temporary habitations in hollow trees, and sometimes underneath large fallen trunks that offer suitable hollows. ”

“ Here and there an ant may be seen, stretching forth first one leg and then another, to be brushed and washed by one or more of its comrades, who perform the task by passing the limb between the jaws and the tongue, finishing by giving the antennæ a friendly wipe. It is a curious spectacle, and well calculated to increase one's amazement at the similarity between the actions of ants and the acts of rational beings—a similarity which must have been brought about by different processes of development of the primary qualities of mind. ”

“ The queen will be quite twice as large as an ordinary ant, and so can be easily seen. Take some of the earth of the ant-hill. Put the earth with your ants and eggs upon the sheet of glass and fix the other sheet above, leaving only the small hole in one corner, made by the shorter strip, which should be stopped with a bit of cotton-wool. The ants will be restless for perhaps forty-eight hours, but will then begin to settle and arrange the earth. ”

“ He can break through ant-hills quite as big and bigger—some of them twenty-feet high—he can project as long and as gluey a tongue—twenty inches long—he can play it as nimbly and “lick up” as many white ants, as any tamanoir. ”

“ The first acquaintance a stranger generally makes with them is on encountering their paths on the outskirts of the forest crowded with the ants,—one lot carrying off the pieces of leaves, each piece about the size of a sixpence and held up vertically between the jaws of the ant, another lot hurrying along in an opposite direction empty handed, but eager to get loaded with their leafy burdens. ”

“ A foraging ant comes wandering by. He surveys it carefully and estimates the horse power requisite to move it, and then hurries away in the direction of home. Meeting another ant he stops, touches antennae for a few moments, and passes on. The second ant makes straight for the grasshopper and finds it without trouble. Nothing can be plainer than that the first ant told the second one where to go. ”

“ In an ant-hill there may be many queens at one time. Often the ant-queens work. They are both mothers and queens. They will also act as soldiers. The queen ant [Pg 6] is not like the queen bee, who will allow no other queen to live near her. I think mother ant a better term than queen ant.
The word “queen” may make you think that this ant rules the rest. That is not so. Ants have no leader and no ruler. Each ant seems to act as it pleases.
The chief work of the queen ant is to lay eggs. In a short time, out of each egg comes a lively, hungry, little baby ant. It is called a larva. ”

“ At this hard labor the ants work in relays, toiling and resting by turn. One holds the narrow strip that has been cut, while a second enlarges the opening, and a third gently extricates the young ant from its natal sac. ”

“ They live upon insects, chiefly white ants, which they catch by tearing open their houses with their strong claws, and then rolling their long tongues among them. The tongue of the ant-eater is covered with a kind of gum, to which the ants stick, and when there is room for not one more, the living mouthful is swallowed. ”

“ On the left hand are several examples of natural birdlime, if we may use the term. The upper represents the Ant-bear, or Great Ant-eater. This animal feeds in a very curious manner. It goes to an ant-hill, and tears it open with its powerful claws. The ants, of course, rush about in wild confusion. Now, the Ant-eater is provided with a long, cylindrical tongue, which looks very like a huge earth-worm, and which is covered with a tenacious slimy secretion. As the ants run to and fro, they adhere to the tongue, and are swept into the mouth of their destroyer. ”