A CHAPTER OF LIFE-HISTORIES. 
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There hatch from these eggs a brood of females, very 
small at first, but, after several moultings, as large as 
their mothers, and resembling them in many ways. 
No males are hatched from these winter eggs. The 
leaf soon becomes covered with a swarm of female 
insects. Indeed, there are no fathers in these armies 
of pigmies. They produce no eggs, but proceed to 
fasten their beaks in a juicy spot and eat and reproduce 
in a most marvelous manner. 
From the abdomens of these strange mothers there 
issues day after day a numberless horde of children like 
themselves. These children grow from the mother as 
buds grow on plants, and then break away to lead an 
independent life. Each tiny bud in a few days becomes 
a mother in the same way, and shortly, from a single 
egg, thousands of wingless mothers sit side by side, 
sucking sap and budding out young with remarkable 
speed. If a man should live a hundred years and 
count at the rate of one a second, he could not begin 
to count in his hundred years the progeny of a single 
aphis for a month. 
Now and then winged forms appear, and sometimes 
an aphis goes through something like a larval and 
pupal stage, while the colony keeps on increasing with 
incredible rapidity by the budding of generation after 
generation. This reproduction without males is called 
parthenogenesis . 
Toward autumn winged males are produced, and 
again the cycle of existence is renewed. 
In studying the life-history of the aphis one should 
notice the relations existing between ants and aphides. 
As the aphis sucks the sweet sap from its shrub it 
obtains an excess of sugar; that is, in order to get all 
the muscle-forming food it requires it must eat more 
sugar than it needs. This excess of sugar is known 
as honey-dew, and it often covers the leaves with a 
sticky film. It comes from two projections on the end 
of the abdomen of the aphis. This honey-dew, not 
