THE SACRIFICE OF WINGS 303 



the lovely veined diaphanous thing, beyond the reach of 

 manufacture, is tumbled into the roots of the grasses ; and 

 shorn of its chief beauty the ant goes to the labour of the nest. 

 No doubt the queen bee makes a like surrender. After 

 that ecstatic dash towards the sun she lives for the most part 

 a housewife's life and a slave's life till the end comes, when 

 a young queen is preferred before her. But she does at any 

 rate keep the engine of flight, if she does not use it. The 

 winged ants are sometimes handicapped by their wings long 

 before they come to the time when irritation or a sense of 

 duty drags them to surrender. If you open a busy hill to 

 watch the organised industry it happens now and again that 

 the winged ant, seeming always more aimless than the rest, 

 will attempt to walk away from the circle of the nest. Not 

 once or twice we have seen one of the self-constituted keepers 

 seize the truant and drag her back incontinent. For such 

 purpose the wing provides a most useful handle. The tip is 

 grasped in the jaw, and the whole twisted this way and that 

 quite regardlessly of the owner's feelings, who stumbles any- 

 how back to the nest in the wake of the keeper. One cannot 

 see that the wing suffers in the least. It must be of the 

 strongest tissue, but even then it seems to be a burden rather 

 than a heaven-sent engine of flight. This use of the wing as 

 a sort of handle belongs to the earlier part of the summer. 

 When the queen is hauled back to the hill in August the 

 contempt of the wing is more roughly expressed. The 

 worker ants, socialistic Marthas not without envy, seem 

 always to have a grudge against the wing ; but it is not till 

 the marriage flight is over that they anticipate the self- 

 surrender of the queen, and themselves nip off the wings 

 before they take on themselves the office of jailer, and 

 prevent her escaping again from the subterranean home and 

 prison. One might mistake them for wasps nipping off the 



