118 ANTS AND ANT LIFE. 



them in the interior of their own nests : but their love for 

 their foster children does not prevent them from eating 

 them up, skin and all, in times of need, when food is scarce. 

 " They take as much care of these eggs," says Schmarda 

 (" Intellectual Life of Animals," 1846), " as they do of 

 their own." According to the same writer, they look so 

 carefully after the safety of the Aphides that they make a 

 kind of embankment of earth as a protection for the plants 

 (especially spurge) on which they live. One day Huber 

 found round the stem of a spurge a small dome or heap 

 of earth, the smooth-walled interior of which gave shelter 

 to a family of Aphides, which the ants would here milk 

 undisturbed, protected from sun, rain, and strangers. The 

 ants came and went to and fro from the neighboring ant- 

 hills through a very small hole made in the lower part of 

 the dome. Huber found a similar " stall " on a little poplar 

 twig five feet from the ground. The leaf -scales of the 

 common plantain, beneath which the Aphides living on this 

 plant withdraw in August, when bloom and stalk are dried 

 up, are walled up and covered in the ground With damp 

 earth, so that plenty of room is left within which the milking 

 can go on unhindered. 



By their caresses and coaxings the ants are able to obtain 

 from the Aphides a larger amount of their sweet juice than 

 is otherwise habitually excreted. This is also the reason 

 why trees and plants suffer which are much visited by ants. 

 But the ants are not,as is generally thought, the direct, but the 

 indirect, cause of the mischief, for first they largely increase 

 the number of the Aphides by their care and tendance, and 

 secondly, as the Aphides yield more to the ants, they must 

 take more from the plant. If there be no ants present, 

 they will of course do the same, but in smaller measure. 

 They then throw their excrement out by a kind of jerk of 

 the abdomen. But if ants are present they wait patiently 

 till they come and relieve them of their burden. The drops 

 are then Seen to follow each other quickly, while otherwise 

 the Aphides can remain quiet for a long time, excreting 

 nothing. The ant takes as much juice as possible into the 

 stomach, and can, as before mentioned, regurgitate the 

 superfluity later for its comrades and larvae. 



The gall insects, parasitic on plants and trees, such as 

 Kermes and Coccus, and especially the cochineal insect 



