1 84 



The Book of Bugs. 



Fig. 38. Monomonium phuraom's, the red ant 

 of the pantry ; a, female ; , worker. 



can and living by the chase, incapable of more than the 

 simplest kinds of communal effort, are all the gradations 

 that one finds in human society from the multi-millionaire 

 to the Digger Indian. It is a comfort to be able to 

 announce that among these low savages are the red ants 

 that from living under stones have come to biting away 



the mortar between 

 the bricks of houses 

 for their troglodyte 

 dens. There are 

 drawbacks to this 

 mode of living, boil- 

 i n g water for i n- 

 stance, and cotton 

 soaked with poison- 

 ous kerosene stuffed 

 in cracks of the 



floors, and this dreadful corrosive sublimate which 

 makes ants go mad and bite each other, but then it has 

 its conveniences, too. It is handy to the sugar bowl 

 and the cake box. Some ants make nests of pure silk 

 between leaves, and until quite recently where the 

 silk came from was a dark mystery, for adult ants 

 do not spin. The pupae, though, secrete a gummy 

 fluid from the mouth, which, when drawn out into a 

 thread, toughens as it dries. The worker picks up a 

 baby as if it were one of these sponge mucilage bottles, 

 dabs its face against the leaf and spins out the silk 

 to build a home. Some ants bore out elaborate cham- 

 bers and galleries in trees and have developed a kind 

 of worker, a big-headed, flat-faced fellow that stands in 

 the doorway and does his specialty entitled, ' The Living 

 Cork." If you know the password, you can get in. If 

 not, you stay out. It does not do the least good to bite 



