42 ROMANCE OF THE INSECT WORLD CHAP. 



opinion is to believe in their special creation for the 

 purpose of relieving the world of a little superfluous 

 fat. Another set of caterpillars (Galleridce) have a 

 strange liking for wax, and to gain this substance 

 force their way into beehives and the homes of wild 

 bees, protecting themselves from the revenge of the 

 lawful owners of the nests by spinning silken web 

 around them in the cells of the combs robbers 

 comparable with the Death's Head Moth. 



Ants indulge in a far stranger food of animal 

 derivation a sweet liquid produced -by insects 

 and often abstract it direct, warm so to speak, 

 from the living body. The suppliers are aphides, 

 or, according to their popular appellation, the 

 plant lice or green fly, unhappily too well known 

 in every flower and kitchen garden. On roses, ger- 

 aniums, beans, cabbage, and fruit trees they multiply 

 amazingly, and suck away the richest of the vegetable 

 juices by means of a rostrum or tube, sometimes of 

 great length, with which they are provided. Careful 

 examination of a plant crowded with aphides seldom 

 fails to reveal the presence of an ant, and it is not by 

 chance that this member of the " little people" has 

 wandered into the midst of the alien assembly. It 

 has come with deliberate intention, to feast off a 

 dainty and luscious .meal, a sugary, limpid, viscous 

 secretion which is now and then exuded by the 

 aphides, and denominated honey-dew. Ants, as 

 a rule, do not wait to obtain it on the yielder's 

 pleasure. One may be seen to approach an aphide, 

 the extremity of whose body it rubs gently but 

 rapidly with its antennae,* as if to entice the insect to 



