230 ENTOMOLOGY FOR MEDICAL OFFICERS 



underground, or among roots, or in decayed timber. Some 

 ants make nests in trees, and there is a well-known Indian 

 ant of fierce disposition that makes its nests of living leaves 

 which are stuck together by sticky secretion expressed from 

 the larvae of the ant, the ants holding the larvae in their 

 mandibles and using them much as we might use tubes of 

 " stickfast." The queens of the community, as usual, produce 

 the eggs, which are taken charge of by the workers. The 

 larvas are not enclosed in separate cells, but are kept 

 together, and are moved about as convenience or necessity 

 may require; they are fed and carefully tended by the 

 workers. The pupae, which also are carefully looked after, 

 are popularly known as "ants' eggs." The issue of the pupae 

 may be wingless workers after their several kinds, or may be 

 winged males and females. Whether the particular issue be 

 due to diet during the larval stage, or not, is not certainly 

 known. The males and females periodically swarm out of 

 the nest for a nuptial flight, soon after which the males die, 

 and the impregnated females remain as potential queens. 

 The communities are long-lived. New communities may be 

 formed by a solitary female, as in the case of wasps and 

 bumble-bees, such a female discharging the double function 

 of worker and queen until the colony is established, and then 

 becoming a true queen devoted entirely to egg-laying. Some 

 ants have proper stings, others have rudimentary stings and 

 merely squirt out their venom. 



It is unnecessary here to refer to the weird and wonderful 

 complications of ant civilisation, in which the individual is 

 nothing and the state is everything. So far may this 

 principle be carried that in the interests of the community 

 certain individuals of certain species become living puncheons 

 for holding the communal honey. Hamlet's imagination 

 tracing " the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping 

 a bung-hole " could hardly find a baser or grotesquer use for 

 the paragon of the insect world. It is well known that 

 certain ants lay up stores of grain and other food ; that many 

 ants herd aphides, and even keep root-feeding aphides and 

 many other insects in their galleries for the sake of the sweet 

 juices that they yield ; and that the leaf-cutting ants bring 

 home bits of leaf and mash them up into balls for the culture 



