HONEY-DEW 167 



among the remains of many other insects a species of ant 

 intermediate between our small brown garden-ants and the 

 little yellow meadow-ants. This is possibly the stock from 

 which these and other allied species are descended. One 

 is tempted to suggest that the brown species which live so 

 much in the open air, and climb up trees and bushes, have 

 retained and even deepened their dark colour ; while others, 

 such as the yellow meadow-ant, which lives almost entirely 

 below ground, have become much paler.' He might have 

 added, as confirmatory evidence, the fact that the perfect 

 winged males and females of the yellow species, which fly 

 about freely during the brief honeymoon in the open air, are 

 even darker in hue than the brown garden-ant. But how 

 the light colour of the neuter workers gets transmitted 

 through these dusky parents from one generation to another 

 is part of that most insoluble crux of all evolutionary 

 reasoning the transmission of special qualities to neuters 

 by parents who have never possessed them. 



This last-mentioned yellow meadow-ant has carried the 

 system of domestication further in all probability than any 

 other species among its congeners. Not only do the yellow 

 ants collect the root-feeding aphides in their own nests, 

 and tend them as carefully as their own young, but they 

 also gather and guard the eggs of the aphides, which , till 

 they come to maturity, are of course quite useless. Sir 

 John Lubbock found that his yellow ants carried the winter 

 eggs of a species of aphis into their nest, and there took 

 great care of them. In the spring, the eggs hatched out ; 

 and the ants actually carried the young aphides out of the 

 nest again, and placed them on the leaves of a daisy 

 growing in the immediate neighbourhood. They then built 

 up a wall of earth over and round them. The aphides 

 went on in their usual lazy fashion throughout the summer, 

 and in October they laid another lot of eggs, precisely like 



