THE HABITS OP ANTS IN GENERAL. 185 



form a small chamber and then completely closes the opening to the 

 outside world. The labor of excavating often wears away all her 

 manclibular teeth, rubs the hairs from her body and mars her burnished 

 or sculptured armor, thus producing a number of mutilations, which, 

 though occurring generation after generation in species that nest in 

 hard, stony soil, are, of course, never inherited. In her cloistered se- 

 clusion the queen now passes days, weeks, or even months, waiting for 

 the eggs to mature in her ovaries. When these eggs have reached their 

 full volume at the expense of her fat-body and degenerating wing- 

 muscles,, they are laid, after having been fertilized with a few of the 

 many thousand spermatozoa stored up in her spermatheca during the 

 nuptial flight. The queen nurses them in a little packet till they hatch as 

 minute larvae. These she feeds with a salivary secretion derived by 

 metabolism from the same source as the eggs, namely, from her fat- 

 body and wing-muscles. The larvae grow slowly, pupate prematurely 

 and hatch as unusually small but otherwise normal workers. In some 

 species it takes fully ten months to bring such a brood of minim work- 

 ers to maturity, and during all this time the queen takes no nourishment, 

 but merely draws on her reserve tissues. As soon as the workers mature, 

 they break through the soil and thereby make an entrance to the nest 

 and establish a communication with the outside world. They enlarge 

 the original chamber and continue the excavation in the form of gal- 

 leries. They go forth in search of food and share it with their ex- 

 hausted mother, who now exhibits a further and final change in her 

 behavior. She becomes so exceedingly timid and sensitive to the light 

 that she hastens to conceal herself on the slightest disturbance to the 

 nest. She soon becomes utterly indifferent to her progeny, leaving them 

 entirely to the care of the workers, while she limits her activities to laying 

 eggs and imbibing liquid food from the tongues of her attendants. 

 This copious nourishment restores her depleted fat-body, but her 

 disappearing wing-muscles have left her thoracic cavity hollow and 

 filled with air which causes her to float when placed in water. With 

 this circumscribed activity she lives on, sometimes to an age of fifteen 

 years, as a mere egg-laying machine. The current reputation of the 

 ant queen is derived from such old, abraded, toothless, timorous queens 

 found in well-established colonies. But it is neither chivalrous nor 

 scientific to dwell exclusively on the limitations of these decrepit bel- 

 dames without calling to mind the charms and sacrifices of their 

 younger days, for to bring up a family of even very small children 

 without eating anything and entirely on substances abstracted from 

 one's own tissues, is no trivial undertaking. Of the many thousands 

 of ant queens annually impelled to enter on this ultra-strenuous life. 



