76 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 



outhouse. I can account for this only by pre- 

 suming that a certain percentage of the nurses 

 were very young and inexperienced workers and 

 dropped their burdens inadvertently. There was 

 certainly no intentional casting out of these off- 

 spring, as was so obviously the case with the 

 debris from the food of the colony. The eleven 

 or twelve ants which fell upon me during my 

 watch were all smaller workers, no larger ones 

 losing their grip. 



While recording some of these facts, I dropped 

 my pencil, and it was fully ten minutes before 

 the black mass of enraged insects cleared away, 

 and I could pick it up. Leaning far over to 

 secure it, I was surprised by the cleanliness of 

 the floor around my chair. My clothes and note- 

 paper had been covered with loose wings, dry 

 skeletons of insects and the other debris, while 

 hundreds of other fragments had sifted down 

 past me. Yet now that I looked seeingly, the 

 whole area was perfectly clean. I had to as- 

 sume a perfect jack-knife pose to get my face 

 near enough to the floor; but, achieving it, I 

 found about five hundred ants serving as a street- 

 cleaning squad. They roamed aimlessly about 

 over the whole floor, ready at once to attack any- 



