NATURALIST IN BRAZIL 



bumble-bee creeping over the ground. On the rail-posts and bushes 

 sat Bemtevis, Scissors-grinders and other birds, filling their crops 

 with these "l9as" ; lizards pursued them, and people collected them, 

 and gave basketfuls of them to their hens ; so that the foundation 

 of a new colony is for the Sauva female a desperately dangerous 

 business. But for the infinite creative powers of Nature, which make 

 up for the wastage by thousands of fresh wanderers, there would 

 soon be no ants left. 



Even on her way to her new home the queen loses her wings, 



or she breaks them off herself, as 

 troublesome appendages, for her next 

 task is to bury herself, and her long 

 wings would be in the way. At last 

 she finds a suitable place, and dis- 

 appears into the earth. And it is when 

 she is underground that her real work 

 begins. Gut off from the entire woild, 

 the queen must rely on herself alone. 

 But here, at least, she is no longer 

 threatened by the enemies that beset 

 her on the surface. She immures her- 

 self completely, excavating a little hole 

 with a domed roof, which has no exit 

 to the outer world. 



The first thing the queen does in 

 her new home is to disgorge the tuft 

 of fungus which she has brought with 

 her, and she at once begins to manure 

 it with her own excrement (Fig. 28). 

 This she does in the most thorough 

 and ingenious manner. She pulls out a scrap of fungus from the 

 growing mass (as Jakob Huber observed in Para), presses it against 

 her anus, from which at the same moment a drop of fluid exudes, 

 replaces the manured fragment, and presses it down with her feet. 

 But how can the queen produce these excretions, since in her solitary 

 cell she has nothing to eat? Well, she eats some of her own eggs; 

 indeed, she eats no less than 90 per cent, of all she lays. 



But those eggs which are spared develop, and presently the first 



larvae appear. These too are given their own brothers and sisters 



in the egg as their first nourishment, and their mother's method 



of administering this diet is as follows : she tickles the larva with 



310 



Fig. 28. — Sauva queen in her 

 closed burrow. Above, she is 

 holding a tuft of fungus to her 

 abdomen, in order to manure 

 it ; below, she is returning It to 

 its place. {After the instantaneous 

 photographs of Jakob Huber, 

 natural size) 



