Ants

“ Yesterday a heavy downpour closed the cracks in the dry ground and flooded some of the ants' nests in the garden. Today a regiment of great black ants is marching up the sides of the open gallery, and here and there one is running over the floor. Three quarters of an inch long, these creatures look rather formidable, but they are not vicious, nor is their nip painful. ”

“ You break away this gallery, and find a troop of white ants hurrying back and forth, extending their road and boring or furrowing the door. But as soon as they are exposed, they run hither and thither in great terror, seeking for their hiding-place. If they cannot reach it, they are lost. The red ants attack them, and seizing their soft bodies with their nippers, after a short struggle bear them writhing away to their holes. ”

“ See how he approaches a fallen tree, which his unerring instinct tells him is perforated through and through, and filled with the swarming millions of ants; with his powerful jaws he munches up the entire mass; the thin and papery partitions of the dusty wood are ground to powder, and the ants are licked in and chewed into a black pulp between those curious cylinders of teeth. ”

“ Young ants, like young people, wish to set up for themselves in new homes. They spread their fine wings. Off they fly! Since there is not room in the old hill they will build a new one.
They swarm as the bees do. As they rise high from the earth, they drift off on the wind. Very many of them tire out and die, or are blown into the water, and are drowned. A few live and settle on places fit for a new ant-hill.
It is the mother or queen ant who chooses the new home. When she has found the right place, what do you think she does? She takes off her wings, as she does not care to fly any more. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Living chiefly among the ants, on which they feed, their cuirass of hard, polished, close-set scales protects them from a bite or sting. Another beautiful provision of nature is, that the young ones, on being hatched, find food ready at hand—at mouth, rather—the eggs having been laid, or the young ones born, in the nest of the ants. ”

“ Everywhere the ants were running out of their tunnels and burrows, many carrying burdens and giving one strangely the impression that while they were intensely alive and active, not more than half of them had any clear idea of where they were going. ”

“ I found out about some naughty, lazy ants, sir. Instead of taking care of their own homes and hunting up their own food, they go out to war against another kind of ant, which is living quietly and attending to its own business. All the grown-up ants these little fighters either kill or frighten so that they run away as fast and as far as their legs will carry them. Then these lazy ants steal the eggs and the babies. Some of them they eat on the way home, but most of them they carry to their underground galleries. There they take good care of them until they are grown up. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both bees and ants are fond of honey-dew, which the former insect licks from the leaves with its brush-like tongue, the latter taking a more direct course and lapping it as it exudes from the tubes. While on the leaves, the ants are more than usually combative, and if the hand be placed near them, will tuck their tails under them, sit up like dogs begging, and flourish their antennæ in a manner which they doubtlessly think well adapted to frighten the disturbers of their peace. ”

“ A certain species of ants keeps Aphides in bondage, just as we do cows, for the sake of the honey-dew which they collect; a certain kind of red ant is indolent, and keeps black ants to do work for it. Once more, there is a kind of beetle which is blind and helpless, usually found in ants' nests; the ants care for all their wants and nurse them tenderly. These things, and much more, of the lives of insects, are told us in popular language in Sir John's book, which we recommend, not alone to the entomologist, but to the general reader.—Quarterly Journal of Science. ”

“ For many years ants have been recognized as among the most interesting of the little animals that people our fields. However, not until recently have we begun to understand, even in a small measure, their economic importance and the part they play in maintaining the balance in insect life. Therefore, we shall give a few studies of ants and their ways, and as a knowledge of their habits is necessary to begin with, we will take up the ant-nest first. ”

“ Not only all kinds of ants, and other insects, but birds, and carnivorous reptiles, are upon the hunt for them, and the inhabitants of many countries eat them.
From one of the most active, industrious, and rapacious; from one of the most fierce and implacable little animals in the world, they are in this state changed into an innocent helpless insect, incapable of making the least resistance to the smallest ant. The ants are to be seen on every side in infinite numbers, of various species and sizes, dragging these annual victims to their different nests. ”

“ LEAVING the beetles—though as there are probably some thousands that live habitually in ants’ nests, we have said very little about them—we may glance at an extraordinary little creature, in appearance something like a wood-louse with a fish’s tail, that resides with certain ants on the footing of a freebooter, constantly stealing from them, and eluding their resentment by extreme activity, living, as it were, in a state of perpetual motion. ”

“ The ants carry them in their jaws, each piece by a little end left for a stem.
We have some parasol ants in this country, in Florida and Texas, and there are many of them in South America.
LESSON IX. WONDER ANTS.
You may perhaps read of what are called “Termites,” or White Ants. You must not think that these are true ants, for they are not. They belong to another Order of insects. They have four wings all of the same size. But true ants have one pair of wings smaller than the other.
The white ants live in the ground and also in trees. They do much harm by gnawing wood and trees. ”

“ I suppose, boys, it is because the earth is then better for them; and one thing that has been noticed about their work is, that the rain, when it is not too violent, seems to make it solid, for these ants have no gum or glue about them like some other insects, to make the earth stick together. As soon as the rain [Pg 132] begins, if you watch the brown ants, you may see them come out of the ground in great numbers; and then running in again, they will soon return, each one with a little piece of dirt in his mouth, which he puts down upon the roof of the nest. ”

“ When a nest is disturbed, and the masses of ant-food spread about, the ants are in great concern to carry every morsel of it under shelter again; and sometimes, when I had dug into a nest, I found the next day all the earth thrown out filled with little pits that the ants had dug into it to get out the covered up food. When they migrate from one part to another, they also carry with them all the ant-food from their old habitations. ”

“ Among the workers I saw some ants whose heads and mandibles were very large. These ants never engaged in any of the agricultural pursuits of their sisters; they were the soldiers and the sentinels of the community. One nest migrated while I had them under observation, and I had the pleasure of witnessing the behavior of these fearless little warriors when on the march. The ants were moving nearer to their grain-fields, and were carrying with them their young, etc. ”

“ I was surprised to see in this living nest tubular passages leading down to the centre of the mass, kept open just as if it had been formed of inorganic materials. Down these holes the ants who were bringing in booty passed with their prey. I thrust a long stick down to the centre of the cluster, and brought out clinging to it many ants holding larvæ and pupæ, which probably were kept warm by the crowding together of the ants. Besides the common dark-coloured workers and light-coloured officers, I saw here many still larger individuals with enormous jaws. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A nest that I came across in the latter situation was open at one side. The ants were clustered together in a dense mass, like a great swarm of bees, hanging from the roof but reaching to the ground below. Their innumerable long legs looked like brown threads binding together the mass, which must have been at least a cubic yard in bulk, and contained hundreds of thousands of individuals, although many columns were outside, some bringing in the pupæ of ants, others the legs and dissected bodies of various insects. ”

“ The ants are the scavengers of the country; no beetle, or worm, or grub, or animal matter of any kind, can be many minutes on the ground before it is detected by some ant, which communicates the fact forthwith to its fellows, and they immediately fall on the spoil, cut it in pieces and convey it to their stronghold. ”

“ The young of the beetles are reared in the nests by the ants, who attend to them as carefully as they do to their own young. The beetles have a great fondness for the ants, and prefer to sit amongst a crowd thereof; they are fond of the ants' larvae as food, and indeed eat them to a very large extent, even when their own young are receiving food from the ants. ”

“ All over the tree, ants are now to be seen running about in a state of the greatest excitement, and whenever they meet a caterpillar descending, or preparing to descend, the trunk, in order to burrow into the earth at its base, and there pass its pupal stage of existence, they conduct it down themselves and relieve it from the labour of digging, just in the same way as our English ants do with the aphides. ”

“ It is a little white worm, without feet, and quite powerless, not even able to move. There are in an ant-hill thousands of those little worms. Without stop or rest, the ants go from one to another, distributing a beakful, so that they begin to grow and change in one day into ants. I leave you to think how much they must work and how many plant-lice must be milked, merely to nurse the little ones that fill the dormitories. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor are ants without their enemies. In addition to birds and other larger foes, if you disturb a nest of the brown ants at any time during the summer, you will probably see some very small flies hovering over them, and every now and then making a dash at some particular ant. These flies belong to the genus Phora, and to a species hitherto unnamed, which Mr. Verrall has been good enough to describe for me. They lay their eggs on the ants, inside which the larvæ live. Other species of the genus are in the same way parasitic on bees. ”

“ The presence of an army of ants passing from place to place through the forest—themselves often bent upon a marauding and murderous expedition—may often be discovered long belong the insects themselves are in sight, by the twittering cries and excited actions of the ant-thrushes, that in large flocks are seen hovering above them. ”

“ All that I desire is to instruct and amuse you, and I am sure that the ants can furnish a good lesson to us. I shall begin with the mason ants. They always build their nests either of clay which is damp, and dug from the inside of their city under ground, or which has been made wet by the rain; and a part of their building is always above the ground, so that you can easily see it. There is no fixed rule for the ants to build by. Their cities are not all alike in the inside. Sometimes the walls are larger and coarser, and the ways and galleries are higher, than at other times. ”