2 2 Flowers and their Unbidden Guests. 



even at a considerable distance, and moreover because 

 they do not suspend their activity during the night, 

 as I repeatedly noticed whilst making observations on 

 the visitation of night-blowing flowers. But the reason 

 why, notwithstanding this, wingless ants on the whole 

 are found but rarely in flowers, is that there exists a 

 large number of protective appliances by which the 

 nectar is admirably protected against them. Should 

 for once no such protective appliance be developed, or 

 should it in any way be made useless or cease to act, 

 should it in short in any way become possible for the 

 ants to get at the nectar without harming themselves, 

 then they forthwith appear in the flowers as guests. Of 



One day he took it into bis head to put the pounded sugar into a 

 vessel, which he fastened with a string to the transom of the window ,- 

 and, in order that his long-petted insects might have information of 

 the supply suspended above, a number of the same set of ants were 

 placed with the sugar in the vessel. These busy creatures forthwith 

 seized on the particles of sugar, and soon discovering the only way 

 open to them, viz., up the string, over the transom and down the 

 window-frame, rejoined their fellows on the sill, whence they could 

 resume the old route down the steep wall into the garden. Before 

 long the route over the new track from the siU to the sugar, by the 

 window-frame, transom, and string was completely established ; and 

 so passed a day or two without anything new. Then one morning 

 it was noticed that the ants were stopping at their old place, that 

 is, the window-sill, and again getting sugar there. Not a single 

 individual any longer traversed the path that led thence to the 

 sugar above. This was not because the store above had been 

 exhausted ; but because some dozen little fellows were working 

 away vigorously and incessantly up aloft in the vessel, dragging 

 the sugar crumbs to its edge, and throwing them down to their 

 comrades below on the siU, a sill which with their limited ramge qf 

 vision they could not possibly see ! (Gredler, Der Zoohgische Garten, 

 XV. 434.) 



