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The food of ants consists of insects — large numbers of 

 which they destroy — and almost any sweet substance. Al- 

 though none of our English ants store up food for the winter 

 — indeed their food is not of a nature to allow of this — yet in 

 the S. of France four species provide for the winter by storing 

 up the seeds of grasses, &c., thereby confirming the state- 

 ment of King Solomon in the Book of Proverbs, which was 

 until quite recently considered to be erroneous. The ants by 

 some means prevent the seeds in their nests from sprouting 

 without destroying the germ, for in a deserted nest the seeds 

 will begin to grow. The harvesting-ant of Texas clears a disc 

 of ten or twelve feet diameter round its nest of everything 

 except a plant called ' ant-rice ' and a kind of grass, the 

 seeds from which, when they fall off, are carefully collected 

 by the ants. 



Some kin ds — as for instance, Lasius niger, climb 

 bushes to get the larvae of aphides. When an ant has 

 found one of these, it strokes it with its antennae, and the 

 aphis exudes from a tube in its back a drop of sweet fluid 

 which the ant drinks. The ants keep these aphides in 

 their nests, and even take care of their eggs until they are 

 hatched. 



It seems natural to many kinds of ants to carry off the 

 larvae or pupae of other species, and this leads to the strange 

 system of slavery which exists among them. A species, F. 

 sanguinea, makes periodical expeditions to carry off from 

 neighbouring nests the pupae of the slave-ant, F. fusca, and 

 when the ants emerge from these pup«, they set about the 

 household duties as if they were in their own nest. Another 

 species has become so dependent on its slaves, that it cannot 

 even feed itself, and its mandibles have lost their sawlike 

 teeth from long disuse. 



The worker-ants in a nest are females, whose generative 

 organs are almost entirely undeveloped. 



Some species occasionally form a very large colony of 

 nests close to one another. I found near Cambridge a 

 meadow, in which there were over fifty nests of the yellow 



