236 GO TO THE ANT 



tion, while they retained his remaining moiety as an avail- 

 able honey-bag : but from this cannibal proceeding ant- 

 etiquette recoils in decent horror ; and the amber globes 

 are ' pulled up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled 

 into the graveyard, along with the juiceless heads, legs, and 

 other members.' Such fraternal condiict would be very 

 creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not for a 

 horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the 

 insects don't know they could get at the honey by breaking 

 up the body of their lamented relative. If so, their apparent 

 disregard o. utilitarian considerations may really be due not 

 to their sentimentality but to their hopeless stupidity. 



The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing 

 honey in the living bodies of their own fellov^s is easy 

 enough to understand. They want to lay up for the future 

 like prudent insects that they are ; but they can't make 

 wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the 

 purely human art of pottery. Consequently — happy thought 

 — why not tell ofif some of our number to act as jars on be- 

 half of the others? Some of the community work by 

 going out and gathering honey ; they also serve who only 

 stand and wait — who receive it from the workers, and keep 

 it stored up in their own capacious indiarubber maws till 

 further notice. So obvious is this plan for converting ants 

 into animated honey-jars, that several different kinds of 

 ants in different parts of the world, belonging to the most 

 widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the 

 very self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there 

 is a totally different Australian honey-ant, and another 

 equally separate in Borneo and Singapore. This last kind 

 does not store the honey in the hind part of the body 

 technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle divi- 

 sion which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a 

 transparent bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature 



