340 THE WORLD OF ANIMAL LIFE 



Besides being skilful builders, ants are clever road and tunnel 

 makers. Sometimes they make a tunnel from their nest to a tree, 

 where they get a large supply of honey-dew from the aphides. 



Roads are to be seen starting from their nest and leading 

 in all directions. If you watch these roads you will see ants 

 coming and going on them bringing in food, generally insects 

 they have captured and killed, to the nest. You may see them 

 meeting and apparently talking to one another. It is supposed 

 that they give one another information about anything they 

 may have seen, and even directions how to find it; for after 

 being stopped in this way those going from the nest often 

 change their direction and make off towards the place whence 

 their friend has come. 



Ants are very courageous, and will sometimes attack insects 

 much larger than themselves. If their victim is too large for 

 them to carry, they tear it to pieces, or get their friends to help to 

 carry it off, to feed the young and the stay-at-homes. Some ants 

 are furnished with stings, which they use with effect on any animal 

 that assaults them or damages their nest. 



WASPS (Family Vespid^) 



Wasps, like their cousins the bees, are divided into three classes, 

 namely, queens, drones, and workers. 



In the early summer the queen wasp, which has lived all 

 winter in some snug retreat, comes out and looks for a suitable 

 place to make a nest. She perhaps chooses to suspend her nest 

 from the branch of a tree, but usually she decides to occupy some 

 deserted mouse - hole, and having taken possession, she sets to 

 work to enlarge it and to hollow out the interior into quite a large 

 chamber. Then she starts to build. She has taken care that the 

 chamber is in such a position that one of the small roots of a 

 neighbouring tree will run across the roof, and to this she fastens 

 a small perpendicular column of a curious, paper-like substance, 

 which she obtains by scraping from old posts and fences a quantity 

 of decaying wood, and then kneading it up with her jaws. 



