death of the Queen Mother — the Queen 
that had founded the colony — would be 
a great blow for that very reason. But 
to the ants the new Queen seems as good 
as the old one. She has the ant-hill 
smell on her. She will lay eggs and the 
colony will go on growing as before. 
But there is one thing that ants can¬ 
not realize, because they do not have 
minds and cannot think as people can. 
They have been fooled by this stranger, 
simply because she smells all right. She 
is really a red ant. When she begins 
to lay eggs, the eggs hatch into red ants. 
And the red ants make slaves of the 
real builders of the colony. 
They won’t do a bit of work for them¬ 
selves. They have to be fed and cleaned 
and tended, just as if all of them were 
princesses. They are parasites, the kind 
of insects that live on others. 
After a while there are so many para¬ 
site ants that the ant hill has a hard time 
41 
