Queen ant

“ The worker ant, on the contrary, bears all the stigmata of incomplete and retarded development. Although these differences between the queen honey-bee and queen ant and between the respective workers must be apparent to the most superficial observer, yet the familiar conception of the queen honey-bee as little more than an egg-laying machine, so degenerate that she can not exist apart from the workers, has been tacitly expanded to embrace the queen ant. ”

“ Nothing could or can destroy them. As long as the queen ant remains they can never be exterminated. An English engineer who came to Kerman told me that, when he was living in India, he was building a house, and before he laid the foundations he offered large rewards for all queen ants found in the grounds near, for, said he, “This is the only way to ensure freedom from these pests.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their life is comparatively long: I have had working ants which were seven years old, and a queen ant lived in one of my nests for fifteen years. The community consists, in addition to the young, of males, which do no work, of wingless workers, and one or more queen mothers, who have at first wings, which, however, after one marriage flight, they throw off, as they never leave the nest again, and in it wings would of course be useless. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The perfect female or “queen” ants (figs. 1, 1, 3, a) often cast their wings (fig. 3, b) after the nuptial flight; in a few species the females, and in still fewer the males, never develop wings. (For the so-called “white ants,” which belong to an order far removed from the Hymenoptera, see Termite.)
Structure.—The head of an ant carries a pair of elbowed feelers, each consisting of a minute basal and an elongate second segment, forming the stalk or “scape,” while from eight to eleven short segments make up the terminal “flagellum.” ”

“ I suppose the eggs are removed as soon as laid, for I never found any along with the queen ant. If the tree be shaken, the ants rush out in myriads, and search about for the molester. This case is not like the last one, where the tree has provided food and shelter for the ants, but rather one where the ant has taken possession of the tree, and brought with it the scale insects ”

“ Until recently, the manner in which fresh nests of ants were founded was unknown. In established nests the queen-ant is fed and tended by the workers, and the care of the helpless larvae and pupae also devolves entirely on the workers, so that the queens are relieved of all functions except that of producing eggs. ”

“ In ant-hills we find drone ants, queen ants, and worker ants. The drone ants have no sting and do no work. Their bodies are longer and more slim [Pg 5] than those of queens. The drone ants have wings.
A House in a Hill.
The queen ants also have wings. They have stings, and their bodies are round and dark.
The workers are smaller than queens and drones. They are also darker, and have no wings and no stings. Workers are of two sizes, large and small. They are the builders, nurses, soldiers, and servants of the others. ”

“ These great mounds are made by the white ants, and contain their nests; but large and strong as they are, the ant-eater breaks them down and devours the ants. A queen white ant is shown at the right-hand corner with the extraordinary development in which the eggs are carried.
These great mounds are pierced in every direction with innumerable galleries, leading to and from the various cells and chambers in which the domestic economy of the white ants is principally performed, one of which, known as the royal cell, contains the king and queen, and is situated beneath all the others. ”

“ These white ants are of various kinds and sizes, but they are similar, in that they build great nests of clay which extend above the ground from one or two to twenty or more feet. These nests are known as ant hills, and in this part of the country some of them are not unlike hillocks. They are all honeycombed within and down deep into the earth, and are the homes of the various members of the community, consisting of the large, bulky, wormlike white queen, an inch or two in length, the savage, warlike soldiers, and the small, inoffensive-looking workers. ”

“ The males fall to the ground and die. The queens break off their wings, because they never need them after the wedding journey.
"They look about for a good place to start a new home. The first thing the queen does is to lay her eggs in a neat little pile. These soon hatch out into larvæ; tiny, worm-like grubs without any legs. Queen ants feed their babies faithfully with nice, tender insects, which they chew for them. Sometimes these larvæ spin a tiny cocoon, in which they lie quietly while they are being made over into ants—perhaps into a queen, like the mother, or a male, like the father ”

“ If you saw them carefully closing the doors of their nests at night or in wet weather, and opening them again in the morning, and carrying their young out-of-doors to enjoy the sun on bright days, and a dozen other shrewd habits, you might well imagine they thought it all out. Among the strangest of these ant-philosophers are the driver ants of West Africa, a species which can not endure the hot suns of that region. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Stimson Lambert of Owensboro, Kentucky, a careful and accurate observer, informs me that he has frequently observed the large red ants (F. rufa) helping their mutilated or crippled companions.
Ants exhibit another emotion that shows the high development of their psychical or emotional nature. In the tender watchfulness and care of their young they are surpassed by no living creature. As soon as the young ant bursts its pupa case, it is carefully assisted into the world by its foster-mothers. ”

“ The creature lives in the tree-tops and is diurnal in habits. It moves along the branches with great rapidity, either in an upright position or inverted like a sloth, the prehensile tail being used constantly. Ants form the food, and as these ascend even the highest trees, the little ant-eater has a never-failing and abundant supply; they are gathered up hurriedly as the little creature moves quickly along.
One day an army of carnivorous ants invaded our quarters while we were busily occupied preparing the specimens collected during the morning. ”

“ Belt believes, after much careful observation, that these ants protect the plant they live on from leaf-eating insects, especially from the destructive Saüba ants,—that they are in fact a standing army kept for the protection of the plant! This view is supported by the fact that other plants—Passion-flowers, for example—have honey-secreting glands on the young leaves and on the sepals of the flower-buds which constantly attract a small black ant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the course of his remarks Sir John cited many interesting particulars of the ways in which flowers are protected from the incursions of ants, whose visits would be harmful, both from their rifling the stores from the bees, by whom alone they are likely to be fertilised, and from the liability of the latter to desert any species in which their tender probosces were in danger of being seized by ants—it being the nature of an ant to grapple any pointed thing directed towards her. ”

“ Lincecum that in one respect their habits manifest an astonishing, and indeed wellnigh incredible, advance upon those of their European allies. For this observer, who, it must be remembered, was the first to call attention to these ants in the New World, and whose other observations, extending over a number of years, have since been fully confirmed—this observer states in the most positive terms that the ants actually sow the seeds of a certain plant called the ant-rice, for the purpose of subsequently reaping a harvest of grain; hence these ants have been called the "agricultural ants." ”

“ Ants are in many cases great enemies to them, for they like honey as much as bees and butterflies do, yet you will easily see that they are so small that if they creep into a flower they pass the anthers without rubbing against them, and so take the honey without doing any good to the plant. Therefore we find numberless contrivances for keeping the ants and other creeping insects away. Look for example at the hairy stalk of the primrose flower; those little hairs are like a forest to a tiny ant, and they protect the flower from his visits. ”

“ Sometimes somebody does come in the shape of another ant—the real ant this time, not the defenseless Neuropteron, but some valiant and belted knight from the warlike Formicidæ. Singly or in troops, this rapacious little insect, fearless in its chitinous coat-of-mail, charges down the tree-trunk, its antennæ waving defiance to the enemy and its cruel mandibles thirsting for termite blood. The worker white ant is a poor defenseless creature, and, blind and unarmed, would fall an immediate prey to these well-drilled banditti, who forage about in every tropical forest in unnumbered legion. ”

“ I was rather fancifully describing her wings, dear, which she takes off herself when she enters the nest, having no further use for them. There are three kinds of ants in every nest: perfect males and females, and the workers. There are many different races of ants, from the great white ant of Africa—a terror to the natives, though in some respects his good friend—down to the little red-and-yellow meadow ants so common among us. ”

“ By stroking the aphides with their antennæ they cause them to emit the sweet fluid, which the ants then greedily sip up. Various other insects are looked after by ants in a similar manner, or are found in their nests. It has been observed that some species, like the European Red Ant (Formīca sanguinĕa) , resort to violence to obtain working ants of other species for their own use, plundering the nests of suitable kinds of their larvæ and pupæ, which they carry off to their own nests to be carefully reared and kept as slaves. ”

“ I have no doubt that the primary object of these honey-glands was to attract the ants, and keep them about the most tender and vulnerable parts of the plant, to prevent them being injured; and I further believe that one of the principal enemies that they serve to guard against in tropical America is the leaf-cutting ant, as I have noticed that the latter are very much afraid of the small black ants. ”

“ Still, although the ants of the old world are chiefly carnivorous, or feed on soft substances, and in consequence have not the least idea of hoarding food for the winter, there is one species of Brazilian ant which absolutely builds houses, prepares ground, sows seed, reaps the grain, and stores it away for future consumption. It is the Agricultural Ant, Atta malefaciens, first described by Dr. Lincecum, who watched the insect for twelve years before publishing an account that he knew would at first be received with incredulity. ”

“ Its head, flat and square, is armed with two moveable crooked horns, whose singular structure shews how admirable Nature is, even in the least of her works.
This insect is the most subtle and dangerous enemy the ant has; the plans which he forms to ensnare his prey, are very ingenious. He mines a portion of land in the form of a funnel, at the bottom of which he waits to seize the ants, which coming by chance to the edge of the precipice, are thence hurried down to their merciless foe. ”