22 ANIMALS OF NO IMPORTANCE. 



For their size ants are endowed with remarkable strength. 

 An ant will carry off, apparently without the least exertion, 

 a grain of corn or other load three times its own weight. 



The wasp cannot be called a general favourite, for most 

 people only know it by its sting. The sting, however, 

 is really an instrument for depositing eggs, and is only 

 incidentally turned into a weapon of offence or defence. A 

 wasp will never sting unless frightened. The queen 

 wasp is the finest specimen of feminine industry and ma- 

 ternal devotion found in the animal world. At the begin- 

 ning of the hot weather the royal lady awakes from her 

 torpor and founds a new colony. "I want you," writes 

 Grant Allen, "to understand the magnitude of the task this 

 female Columbus sets herself Columbus, Cornelia, and 

 Caesar in one the task not only of building a Carthage, 

 but also of peopling it. She has no hands to speak of, 

 but her mouth, which acts at once as mouth, and hands, 

 and tools, and factory, stands her in good stead in her car- 

 pentering and masoning." Her nest is a veritable work 

 of art. It is composed of a vast number of rooms, in each 

 of which she lays an egg. When these hatch she carefully 

 feeds and tends the larvae, the while laying more eggs and 

 extending the nest. The first perfect wasps to emerge 

 are the workers ; they then relieve the over-worked queen 

 of all duties except that of laying eggs. Of these a queen 

 wasp will produce five or six thousand. 



Disliked even more than the wasp is the white ant, which, 

 by the way, is not an ant at all, belonging as it does to 

 quite a different order of insects. Our dislike of white ants, 

 or Termites as they are more properly called, is certainly 

 well-founded, for in the bungalow they are an unmitigated 

 nuisance. Out of doors, however, they perform a most 

 useful function. They are for countries with hot dry climates 

 what the earthworms are for damp temperate regions, 

 nature's ploughmen. 



As every Anglo-Indian knows, these " worst abused of 

 all living vermin " feed upon dried wood. 



