CHAP. VII. DOMESTIC INSECTS. ANTS. 233 



the shore was strewed with their dead bodies, the efflu- 

 via from which produced a general pestilence.* 



(244.) Houses, furniture, clothing, food, and medi- 

 cine, in fact, everything which belongs to us, are 

 more or less liable to the depredations of insects. The 

 grub of Tenebrio Molitor Lin. devours our meal, 

 flour, and other farinaceous substances, in which it will 

 exist for two years before it passes into its state of 

 inactivity. Flies and wasps will consume almost in- 

 credible quantities of sugar ; and the latter are the 

 greatest destroyers of all stone fruit. Sweetmeats are the 

 prey of a small oblong mite; and cheeses, we well know, 

 are frequently over-run with another species (Acarus 

 Siro Lin.). Vinegar swarms with the maggots of a 

 little fly (Musca cellaris Lin.) ; and even dried meats 

 such as hams, bacon, &c. have their peculiar insect 

 (Dermestes lardarius), which carries on, with consider- 

 able celerity, the work of devastation, a fact known to 

 every housekeeper. 



(245.) The ants of Guiana and Surinam are the 

 greatest pests of houses. Stedman says, " On visiting 

 my boxes, I found that great depredations had been 

 committed by the ants, which, throughout Guiana, are 

 very numerous, and of so many different species, that 

 I once had a pair of new cotton stockings perfectly 

 destroyed by them in one night only : those which fre- 

 quent the estates are generally small, but very trouble- 

 some. The only possible way of keeping them from 

 the refined sugar is, by hanging the loaf to the ceiling 

 by a nail, and making a ring of dry chalk around it, 

 very thick, which crumbles down the moment the ants 

 attempt to pass it. I imagined that placing my sugar 

 boxes in the middle of a tub, and on stone, surrounded 

 with deep water, would have kept back this formidable 

 enemy ; but to no purpose : whole armies of the lighter 

 sort, to my astonishment, marched over the surface, 

 and but very few of them were drowned. The main 

 body constantly scaled the rock, and, in spite of all my 



* Int. to Ent vol. i. p. 221. 



