THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



537 



lucent tissue, showing the amber 

 honev distinctlv through the dis- 

 teiKled skin. They looked like large 

 white currants, or sweet- water grapes; 

 and as they were actually tilled with 

 grape-sugar, tlie resemblance was 

 really quite as true inside as out. 



Where did tlie honey come from? 

 That was the next question. Every- 

 body knows that ants are very fond of 

 sugar, and thev often steal the nectar 

 in flowers whleli the plant has put 

 there to entice the fertilizing bee. So 

 much damage ilo they do in this way, 

 tluit nniiiv iilants have clothed their 

 stalks with hairs, or sticky glands, on 

 purpose, ill order to prevent the ants 

 from creeping up the stem and rifling 

 the nectary. In other cases, however, 

 lilants acliially lay by honey to allure 

 the ants, when they have anything to 

 gain from their visits, as in the case 

 of those Central American acacias, 

 mentioned by Mr. Belt, which liave a 

 nectar-gland on the leaf-stalk to at- 

 tract certain bellicose ants, which so 

 protect tliem from the ravages of 

 their leaf-cutting congeners. Of 

 course, everybody has heard, too, how 

 our own sjiecies sucks honeydew from 

 the little aphides, or plant-lice, which 

 have often been described as ant- 

 cows, lint it is not in either of these 

 ways that the lioney-ants get their 

 sugar. Dr. McCook had a little trouble 

 in settling this matter at lirst. for the 

 lioney ants are a nocturnal suecies. 

 and he had to foilnw tliem through 

 tlie thick scrub, lantern in hand; slill, 

 he satisfactorily settled at last that 

 they obtain tlie" nectar from the galls 

 on an oak, where it must simply be 

 exuded as an accidental iiroduct of 

 injury. The workers take it home 

 with them, and give it to tlie lioney- 

 bearers, who swallow but do not digest 

 it. They keep it in their crops ready 

 for use, exactly as bees keep it in cells 

 of the honey-comb. When t'le work- 

 ers are hur'igry they caress a honey- 

 bearer with their anteniue, where- 

 upon she ju'csses back a little of the 

 nectar up her throat, and tbe workers 

 sip it from her mouth. The lioney- 

 bearers, in short, have been converted 

 into living honey- jars. They are thus 

 passively useful to the community, 

 for in this curiously-ordered common- 

 wealth, they also serve who only stand 

 an<l wait. 



How could such a strange result as 

 this have been brought aboutV Dr. 

 McCook, tliough not himself an 

 avowed evolutionist, has supplied us 

 with facts which seem to suggest the 

 ]iroper answer to this ditlicult ques- 

 tion. He has shown that the rotunds 

 (as he calls them) are not, in all proba- 

 bility, a separate caste, but are merely 

 certain specialized individuals taken 

 at haphazard from the worker-major 

 class. He saw himself in the nests 

 many worker-majors, which seemed 

 at that moment actually in course of 

 transformation into honey-bearers. 

 Now, it is easy enough to understand 

 why these social insects should wish 

 to store up food against emergencies. 

 At all times, the queen, the young 

 female ants, the males, and the grubs 

 or larva; are entirely dejiendent upon 

 others for support. Hence, alike 

 among bees and ants, stores of food 



are habitually laid by, sometimes in 

 the form of honey in combs and bee- 

 bread, as with tile hive-bee ; some- 

 times in the fiuiii of seeds and grains, 

 as with the harvesting ants. During 

 the winter months or the rainy sea- 

 son, when f»od fails outdoors, there 

 must be some reservoir at home to 

 neet the demand of the starving com- 

 munity. I'nder such circumstances, 

 any trick of manner which tended to 

 produce a habit of storing food would 

 be higlily useful to the nest as a 

 whole ; and, taking nests as units in 

 the struggle for existence, which they 

 really are, those nests which possessed 

 any such trick would survive in sea- 

 sons wlien others might perish. ,So 

 the tendency, once set up, would grow 

 and be strengthened from generation 

 to generation, those ants which stored 

 most fond being most likely to tide 

 over bad times, and to hand in their 

 own peculiarities to the other swarms 

 or nests wliich took origin from them. 



A set of primitive ants, living upon 

 the honey of the oak-galls, have no 

 tendency to produce wax, like bees, 

 because their luibits with regard to 

 their larva- do not lead them to make 

 such cells at all. The eggs and grubs 

 siuiply lie about loose among the 

 chambers of the ant-hill, instead of 

 being con lined in regular hexagonal 

 cradles. Hence, the bees' mode of 

 honey-storing is jiractically impossi- 

 ble for them; they have not the 

 groundwork habit from which it might 

 be developed. Hut the ants have a 

 crop, or first stomach, in which they 

 store their undigested food, before 

 passing it into the gizzard, exactly as 

 in fowls. AV'lien ants come back from 

 feeding, whether on flowers, on 

 aphides, or on galls, their crops are 

 very much distended; and they can 

 bring back tlif^ food to their mouths 

 from these distended crops, to supply 

 the grubs and their other helpless de- 

 pendents in the nest. If, therefore, 

 some of the ants were largely to over- 

 eat themselves, they would be able to 

 feed an exceptionally large number of 

 dependents. 



Dr. McCook observed tliat some 

 very greedy workers, returning to the 

 nest, fastened themselves upon the 

 roof in the same position as the hon- 

 ey-bearers, and, in fact, seemed grad- ! 

 ually to grow into rotunds. The 

 other ants would soon learn that such 

 lazy, overgrown creatures were the 

 best to go to for food; and, in time, 

 tliese gorgers might easily become 

 specialized into a honey-bearing set of 

 insects. The workers' would bring 

 them honey, which they would store 

 up and disgorge as needed for the 

 benefit of the rest as a whole. If the 

 honey jiassed into their gizzards and 

 was digested, they would be a positive 

 dead loss to the community, and so 

 the tendency would soon be elimi- 

 nated by natural selection, because 

 the nests possessing such workers 

 could not hold their own in bad times 

 against neighboring communities. 

 But as only a very small quantity is 

 ever digested— just as much as is nec- 

 essary to keep up the sedentary life of 

 such immovable fixtures— the effect is 

 about the same as if the honey were 

 stored in cells of wax. The ants, in 



fact, utilize the only good vessel or 

 utensil they have at their disposal, 

 the flexible and extensible abdomen 

 of their own comrades. 



The greatest difliculty is to under- 

 stand liow the workers first acquired 

 the habit of feeding these lazy mem- 

 bers to such repletion ; but as all ants 

 "take toll" of one another, this is 

 much less of a crux than it looks at 

 first sight. A very greedy aut, which 

 not only ate much itself while out 

 foraging, but also took toll of all 

 others in the nest, after it was too full 

 to move about readily, would be in a 

 fair way to become a rotund. And as 

 it would thus be iiertorming a useful 

 function for the rest, at the same time 

 that it was gratifying its own epi- 

 curean tastes, the "habit would soon 

 become fixed and specialized, till at 

 last we should get just such a regular 

 and settled form of honey-storing as 

 we see in this Colorado species. In- 

 deed, another totally distindt type of 

 ant in Australia has arrived at ex- 

 actly the same device quite sepa- 

 rately, as so often happens in nature 

 under similar circumstances. What- 

 ever benefits one creature under any 

 given conditions will also benefit 

 others whose conditions are identical :, 

 and thus we often get adaptive resem- 

 blances between plants and animals 

 very widely removed from one another 

 in genealogical order. 



For the American Bee JoumaL. 



A Few Honey Plants. 



L. ir. PAMMEL. 



This is the time of the year when 

 good honey jilants are more needed 

 than any other, tV)r it is in the month 

 of August when the bee-keeper expects 

 to reap the reward of his diligent la- 

 bors, but should misfortune, or rather 

 negligence be his lot, then he awaits 

 in anticipation of the coming year; 

 but should that prove a failure, he be- 

 comes discouraged and abandons bee- 

 keeping. .Small honey crops are not 

 always the result of a poor honey year, 

 but are more often due to a want of 

 bee forage. I will describe a few honey 

 jilants which bloom during the month 

 of August, that the bee-keeper should 

 plant. I will first mention wild ber- 

 gamot (Monardd. fisttdosd]. which com- 

 mences blooming about .July 2.5th, and 

 continues 4 weeks. This season it is. 

 2 weeks late. It is an excellent honey 

 plant, and is ailapted to the bee-keep"- 

 er who has only poor, sandy soil, 

 where it thrives best. The honey 

 gathered from this plant is very light 

 and has a strong flavor, though not 

 enough to injure its ready sale. 

 Another excellent quality of tliis plant 

 is tliat bees can gather nectar from it 

 at all times of the day. 



Another good honey plant I will de- 

 scribe as the hoary vervain {verbena 

 stricta). This plant grows abundantly 

 on tlie barren jilains in the west, and 

 blooms during the months of .July and 

 August. It has a dense spike of blue 

 flowers, and attains the height of 2 to 

 ■t feet. Of the other plants belonging 

 to the same order, which are good 

 honey plants, I will mention the blue 



