258 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [14:6— Sept., 1918 



thing of all, for their mother had eaten nothing since she flew away 

 from her city, and yet she fed each grub from her lips on food which 

 her nurses had stored in her body half a year ago ! It was a sweet 

 ant milk, which the grubs ate hungrily and wanted more and more 

 often as they grew. The Queen mother became thinner and 

 thinner, but she delighted in watching her babies grow larger an 

 fatter and more lively every day. 



In three weeks each one was nearly an eighth of an inch long 

 and the Queen's instinct told her that it was time to stop feeding 

 them and put them to sleep. She loosened the warm earth on the 

 floor of the cell and half covered a grub with tiny grains of it. 

 Then the little blind creature who had neither hands not feet began 

 doing a marvelous thing. It drew from its mouth a silk thread 

 so fine that you could not have seen it, and slowly waving its head 

 in every direction and curling its body back and forth, it proceeded 

 to weave a silk cradle all around itself. It fastened some threads 

 to the grains of earth, at first, to make a framework on which to 

 weave, and before long it was enclosed and hidden within a little 

 oblong cocoon of soft, tan-colored silk. Before it had finished, the 

 Queen had half buried many of her other babies, and they had 

 begun their cradle weaving. There were a few who were still 

 hungry and these the mother kept feeding. 



As each cocoon was finished the Queen carefully took away the 

 grains of earth and washed it and carried it to one corner of the cell. 

 By the end of the next day all her children were sleeping in a neat 

 little pile where she had placed them; every now and then she 

 would look them over and brush or wash them off, and then she 

 would lie near them, half alseep. She was almost exhausted, 

 nevertheless, for the two weeks that they slept she watched them 

 and did not eat. 



One day when she was washing the cradles one of them moved a 

 little. She gently bit a tiny hole in one end, and a soft, limp 

 antenna appeared. She made the hole larger with the help of 

 eager little mandibles inside, and there crawled out a ver tiny, 

 pale yellow, wingless ant. She greeted her mother joyously with 

 her quivering antennae and the Queen kissed and washed her soft, 

 pale body. Though her mother was a Queen and her father had 

 been a King, she was a worker who could never have wings or a 

 wedding. She was also a little drawf, smaller than the workers 

 in her mother's city; but her Queen mother was wonderfully 



