| Show nt fighting ants with smoke in brazil prepared d by the nat onci gog aphie soc ety wash agton D c ce III wo vio I 1 ant in Japin ebe con till the lists of two complex characters the first acter means in sect the second unselfish justice and courtesy in other words an ant Is an unselfish fisi fisl just courteous insect that Is a del gotful compliment an I 1 many species may deserve deserie it but there are ants as savage and ruthless as tl ti e ancient huns or mongols ants that devote the r lives to foraging in vast armies destroy in the nests of oti ers and kill ng all insects and anim ils in their way there are queen ants that enter q foreign colony ingratiate themselves with the citizens foully murder the true queen and usurp her place there are ants that raid the nests of their neighbors and kidnap their young as slav es some high in the scale of ant civi I 1 make their own gardens and grow their own special food there are ants that keep cows coms others that gather and store honey in barrels made from living nest mates still others that use their own young as spools of silken thread in making nests in sheer numbers too the ants chal lenge imagination their legions out number those of every other land crea ture in the world except possibly some minute forms of life so far some species subspecies and varieties have been collected and painstakingly classified interesting study the immense amount of work devot ed to studying ants in all reg ons of the world bears witness to their mag betle appeal to the interest of man thus the there re have been published mon on the ants of ala madagascar dag ga sear and of new caledonia catalogues of the species which inhabit brazil chile switzerland connecticut and the pen of baja california one huge volume concerned with the ants of tl ti e belgian congo alone contains 1139 pages alven the ants that crawled on the earth three million years ago live again in the pages of voluminous I 1 looks be cause the r bodies happened to be en bombed and preserved in the following resin of prehistoric pines now known to science as the baltic amber the common little yellow bellow house ant takes readily to life on shipboard and so has traveled to all parts of the world it takes kindly also to heated houses house and so although a tropical ant it thrives in northern countries and has become a pest everywhere one of our lawn ants niger in its several varieties spreads itself throughout the entire northern hemi sphere where it damages the golf greens of washington D C as bially as it does the temple gardens of japan it Is one of the most single species of insect some warm day preferably after a shower find a nice flat stone on a sun ny hillside and turn it over there probably will be an ant nest beneath it a series of channels leading from one cavity to another worker ants rush about excited at the sudden un covering of their home one very much larger than the others Is the queen or there may be several of them if the colony is a large one it if there are males they are present only during the mating season they are usually much smaller than the rest generally dark in color and wearing large w females protected piles of larvae and pupae a few of them unusually big and destined to be come females will be whisked below out of sight while you are watching if you look closely yon you may see the eggs little clusters of tiny white specks adhering together the ant eggs of commerce are not eggs at all but pupae of the large re red d ant the co coons from which adult ants soon would emerge are gathered in large ties in europe and dried and exported to be used as food for goldfish and cap tive soft billed b ads at zoos a few of them are put in custard fed to the anteaters in our nest under the stone there may be one or more reddish beetles stalking slowly about among the ants these are guests or parasites often they I 1 ave a strange hold upon the affect eions of their hosts they feg 1 cg liquid food regurgitated from the communal crop or stomach of the ants which sometimes so neglect their own young to pamper these ins dious ers that the colony becomes debilitated and d es out on the roots of plants in the pass ages there may be plant lice or aal ds and coccids the cows of the ants As the weather gets warmer the lice will be taken out and pastured on the roots of oti er plants es on in than corn where they do much damage to the farmers crops in this cal u ants are an accessory to the tact fact it Is the aphid that does the harm but the damage Is IR greatly exah rated by the ants tender care by a stroking process similar enlar to milk ing the ants obtain from tt e plant lice a highly valued food substance hone honey y dew tt TI Is Is the sweet sap of plan plants ts after it has been sucked out and passed through the bodies of the tiny insects most of which take more than tt ti ey can absorb As this forms the chief food of many ants they tend and protect tl air cows coas as conscientiously as do any pastoral people sometimes they even build sheds of carton a pa pal ery substance on the trunks of trees to shelter them at the approach of cold weather the ants sometimes gither gather them into their nests on plant roots them out to pasture again when nhen the danger of frost Is over and their proper food plants are aror growing ing one point in common all ant coi colonies onles have one point in common the members excepting of course guests parasites and other in are all ch idren of a widow queen who has left tie tl e home nest on her nuptial flight after mating high in the air the male always d es as he lie falls to earth far from the home nest and Is helpless without workers to care for and feed him the female how ever has marvelous resources within herself and all alone she establishes a home and a family of her own after fertilization the q teen creeps into some cranny beneath bark or un der a stone sometimes she constructs a small sm ill belter of crude piper made by chewing birk bark from a tree now she lays her first eggs during the time when she was a larva lama and a newly hatched female in her home nest she had bad been constantly cared for and even pampered by the workers of the parent colony special foods were given her from now on there Is no further use for win wings so she scrapes or bites them off T the e wing muscles disintegrate and add to the stored up food which she Is able to feed her first babies by regurgitation the first hatched are runts and weal lings but ants never their instinct Is fully devel aped and tt ev go to work collecting for their mother and for their new and constantly appearing sisters an ant colony has been created the queen her troubles over becomes a 9 mere egg laying machine carefully fed and protected by her children although practically all ant colonies are founded by bv a lone female there are some extra ord nary exceptions anels one Is Ca an ant of asia and north africa noted for being a great 1 enemy of the white ants or termites on which it teeds deeds takes help with her when the mother to be Ca goes on her honeymoon a number of the al most microscopic workers attach them selves to her legs by their laws and in this way are with her to be of help when she starts the new colony extraordinary and somewhat lirati cal methods of establishing col colonies onles are followed by the females of some ants usually species not physically ca pable of caring for their own first brood one kind steals into the nest of a related species hurriedly seizes and makes a pile of the pupae already there and fiercely defends them from their rightful owners when adult t ants emerge from these pupae tb they ey are loyal to their kidnaper mother and ant like commence to care for her eggs and for the young hatched from them this results in a mixed colony of two species A few species of western ants of the genus formica have very small mall fe males thickly covered with soft yel low hair entering a colony of adoth er though closely related species they so ingratiate themselves with the work ers that they are adopted and the right ful queen Is murdered by her own pro geny who devote the rest of their lives to the new nev queen and her young the original inhabitants eventually die off leaving their native nest entirely in the possession of the usurper and her brood in north africa a fertile queen of the decapitating ant amex de cap capitani itans will fly to a nest or a much larger ant and loiter aroun the entrance until workers seize her they tal e her into tl e nest but for some reason do not eat her whereupon she climbs onto the bad of the r gotful queen and saws at her neck until the head falls off 1 en the workers adopt her and care for her eggs and young until the nest 1 Is 13 3 pop only by tl e offspring of the begic de more miles and females fern lies are 1 ro deuced queens fly away aln I 1 alother ai other nest of lap inoma and repeat the me rrie ess A |
