CHAPTER IV 

 THE DAINTINESS OF ANTS—TOILET HABITS 



IF there be truth in the old saying, cleanliness is next 

 to godliness, insects are but one remove from piety. 

 As tidy as an emmet — is more truthful than most 

 proverbial comparisons. Who ever saw an untidy ant, 

 or bee, or wasp ? The author has observed innmnerable 

 thousands of ants, has lived in his tent in the midst of 

 their great communities, and watched them at all hours 

 of day and night, under a great variety of conditions, 

 natural and artificial, unfavorable to cleanliness, and 

 has never seen one really unclean. Most of them are 

 fossorial in habit, digging in the ground, within which 

 they live; are covered with hair and bristles, to which 

 dirt-pellets easily cling; they move habitually in the 

 midst of the muck and chippage and elemental offal of 

 nature — yet they seem to take no stain and to keep 

 none. 



This is true of other insects. Take, for example, the 

 interesting families of wasps. Many burrow in the earth 

 to make breeding-cells for their young. Others, like the 

 mud-daubers, collect mortar from mud-beds near brooks 

 and pools to build their clay nurseries and storehouses. 

 Some, like the yellow-jackets, live in caves which they 

 excavate in the ground. They delve in the dirt; handle 

 and mix and carry it; mould and spread it, moving to 



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