68 ANIMALS AND INSECTS 



feed and clean their masters until these masters 

 become so helpless that they cannot feed them- 

 selves. They will even lie beside a mass of honey 

 and die without trying to eat it. People become 

 helpless when they are waited upon too much and it 

 is not strange that a little ant, too, suffers from the 

 same cause. God has made all His creatures able to 

 help themselves, and those that do not must suffer. 



At the different doorways of the ant hill door- 

 keepers are always stationed whose duty seems to 

 be to keep out all intruders. They are never absent 

 from their posts, and they feel over with their an- 

 tennae every creature that tries to come in. An ant 

 from another hill they will immediately attack, 

 taking it bodily out of the doorway and thrusting 

 it away. They fight, too, with the ants from an- 

 other hill or city, but they have never been known 

 to quarrel with those of their own company. They 

 even know and will recognize each other after they 

 have been separated many months. If two ants 

 were to be put into a hill, one a stranger and the 

 other one of their own community that had been 

 separated from them for many months, the door- 

 keepers would stroke both ants with their antennae; 

 the friend would be received with signs of pleasure 

 and welcome, while the stranger would be caught 

 up and hurried out, sometimes even killed. 



How can it be possible that all these thousands 

 of ants in one ant city know each other? They not 

 only recognize each other, but they seem to be such 

 friends that they offer to give help and assistance 

 to one another. 



