70 EGGS OF APHIDES KEPT THKOUGH 



perhaps a little sooner. The female eggs are covered 

 with a thin black membrane, are oblong, and about 

 the sixteenth or seventeenth part of an inch in length. 

 The male eggs are of a more brown complexion, and 

 usually laid in March.' 



These dark eggs are not those of ants, but of 

 aphides. The error is very pardonable, because the 

 ants treat these eggs exactly as if they were their own, 

 guarding and tending them with the utmost care. I 

 first met with them in February 1876, and was much 

 surprised to find that the ants took great care of these 

 brown bodies, carrying them off to the lower chambers 

 with the utmost haste when the nest was disturbed. 

 I brought some home with me and put them near one 

 of my own nests, when the ants carried them inside. 

 That year I was unable to carry my observations 

 further. In 1877 I again procured some of the same 

 eggs, and ofiered them to my ants, who carried them 

 into the nest, and in the course of March I had 

 the satisfaction of seeing them hatch into young 

 aphides. Huber had observed certain egg-like bodies 

 in ants' nests. These, however, were not in his 

 opinion true eggs. On the contrary, he agreed with 

 Bonnet, ' that the insect, in a state nearly perfect, 

 quits the body of its mother in that covering which 

 shelters it from the cold in winter, and that it is not, 

 as other germs are, in the egg surrounded by food by 

 means of which it is developed and supported. It is 

 nothing more than an asylum of which the aphides born 



