THE RED ANT. 
195 
tion which has long puzzled formicologists, whether they 
tried to find the answer by observation in the field, or to 
evolve it from their inner consciousness at home. For a 
young queen does hot leave her home, as among bees, with 
a retinue of many hundred workers, but alone, and unless 
she can gather a following of deserters from other nests, 
she must continue alone until her own children are old 
enough to be her attendants. But till then who is to tend 
them ? It was thought impossible that she could soil her 
royal hands with domestic drudgery. We now know, how- 
ever, that in the case of the Red Ant at least this is what 
does happen. She lays a few eggs and broods over them 
like a hen, then contrives somehow to feed and guard the 
helpless grubs till they develop into worker ants and are 
able to take all household cares off her hands. 
Only a few days ago I myself saw a solitary queen on a 
leaf (she had no one to build her a house), with eight 
children around her which had just come of age, and a few 
more still in the white and limbless state of infancy. A 
curious feature of this little family was that the mature 
ants were only half as large as they should have been. I 
had often noticed similar dwarfs before, chiefly in young 
nests, and had wondered why they were so undersized. 
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