workers left, and only a few eggs and 
young ones. The colony must be built 
up again. So, when the wedding day 
comes for the princes and princesses of 
the countryside, our ants are on the 
watch. They must capture as many 
young Queens as they can and take them 
back to the ant hill. They used to need 
only one Queen. But now the more 
Queens they have, the more eggs there 
will be, and the more ants will hatch. 
And so, by the end of the summer, the 
ant colony is almost as well off as it had 
been before. 
Now winter comes. The work of 
collecting food stops. The cows are 
dragged in out of the cold and carried 
far down into the barns. The barns are 
tunneled out right around the roots of 
a corn plant. So all winter the cows can 
feed on the corn-plant juice, while the 
ants tend them, just as any man would 
do on his dairy farm. 
43 
