iS8o.] 
Honey-bearing Ants. 
433 
their habit to separate the head and thorax from the honey- 
bag, burying the former in the fixed cemetery which these 
ants usually establish in the earth outside their nests. But 
though the honey-bag remains, full of its sweet contents, 
the ants — either from respeCt for the dead or from lack of 
mental power to devise a new means of getting at its 
honeyed freight — seem to make no effort to penetrate its 
transparent wall. This is singular, in view of the avidity 
with which they will lick up the smallest portion of sweet 
food offered them in any uncovered condition. 
We may supplement our remarks on these evidences of 
lack of personal sympathy and of benevolence in the honey- 
bearing ants with some description of their anatomy. In 
our former article it was said that the whole abdomen 
appeared to be occupied by the honey, its organs seeming 
to be obliterated, so that only a thin transparent skin 
remained. But anatomical observation shows that this 
external appearance does not give the true faCts of the case. 
All the abdominal organs remain, but so strangely distorted 
and compressed as to be almost imperceptible. The faCl is 
that any of these ants may, if necessary, be converted into 
a honey-bearer, and that the worker, when on her way 
home with her abdomen distended with the fruits of her 
nodurnal labour, has made a step towards the condition of 
the fully-developed honey-bearer. 
It need scarcely be repeated that the intestinal traCl of 
the abdomen of the ant is possessed of three special expan- 
sions, named respectively the crop, the gizzard, and the 
stomach, from their relations in function to the similarly- 
named organs in birds. Of these the crop, into which the 
oesophagus immediately opens, is the recipient of the honey. 
As its stores increase, by continual additions, it expands 
more and more, pressing outward the extensible walls of the 
abdomen, and compressing the remaining portions of the 
intestine into a smaller and smaller space. 
In a fully-laden honey-bearer the crop has become sq 
expanded that it fills nearly the whole interior of the greatly 
dilated abdomen ; the dorsal vessel, or heart, being com- 
pressed and flattened against its upper wall ; while the 
gizzard, stomach, and intestine are similarly compressed 
against the posterior wall. The compression of these organs 
is so great as seemingly to preclude their functional aCtion, 
the stomach appearing to be quite incapacitated for its 
normal office of digestion. Yet the continued vitality of the 
ant is sufficient evidence that alimentation must still exist ; 
and as it is not at all probable that the crop could assume 
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