FEEDING THE COMMUNE 



are periods when the reproduction of eggs by the queen 

 is especially active, and the vast increase of larvae, all 

 needing food and care, greatly multiplies the demand 

 both for food and labor. The pinch of such conditions 

 must fall inevitably upon the helpless young. Should 

 they chance to come contemporaneously with a few 

 days of scarcity, which may arise from various causes, 

 the communal dependents must certainly fare ill, and 

 the death-rate be enlarged among them. 



And it befalls communes of ants, as it comes to nations 

 of men, that great deviations from the ordinary course 

 of nature bring about disasters, at times so great that 

 the very life of the community is at stake. Famine 

 follows in the wake of war and floods, and untimely 

 frosts and droughts consume the sources of food in the 

 world of ants even as of men. The plough turns up the 

 fallow field, and multitudes of ant-nests are destroyed 

 by agriculture. Thus some of our noblest species of 

 native ants are vanishing before the advance of man, 

 as are higher types of animals. 



However, the vitality of some species under the 

 strain of famine is remarkable. Miss Fielde has shown 

 (Tenacity of Life in Ants} that the workers of Cam- 

 ponotus americanus may live nine months without food. 

 They thus rival, in their ability to endure a prolonged 

 fast, the queens that go solitary and draw upon their 

 reserve tissue enough for self-sustenance and also to 

 nourish the firstlings of their flock. The common 

 mode of feeding the young, as heretofore described, is 

 by transfer from the nurses' crops by regurgitation. 

 But a wholly different manner has been observed that 

 is more like our way of giving food to domestic fowl and 

 animals. This grows out of the fact that the larvaa of 



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