288 LIFE AND HER CHILDREN. 
them near to her nest, and tending them with the 
greatest care, even watching over their little black 
eggs, so as to secure fresh broods. In this way she 
rarely needs to come above ground, and has no 
regular openings to her nest. 
Now, when these ants are attacked, they do not 
come out of their nest to fight ; on the contrary, 
they defend it like a fortress, hiding themselves in 
the lower galleries, barring the way with pellets of 
earth, and disputing every inch with the enemy. 
Indeed, if the struggle becomes very hopeless, they 
will escape with their cocoons and grubs along their 
labyrinth of passages, and closing up the road, will 
raise a new ant-hill at some distance from the first. 
These ants work at their nests by night, for as they 
build entirely with earth, they need the damp and dew 
to moisten the pellets, as they plaster their walls. 
The ants we have mentioned, the hill-ant and the 
meadow-ant, have workers of very different sizes, and 
there is very little doubt that the larger workers do 
most of the fighting ; indeed in South Europe and 
America there are in some species special large- 
headed workers, which are the soldiers of the commu- 
nity. But if you will search carefully in the banks 
of the fir woods, or in the stumps of the decayed trees 
of Hampshire, Surrey, or Sussex, you may chance to 
come across a much more curious sight than mere 
difference of size ; for you will find large red ants * 
and smaller black ones, t living in one nest, and 
working happily together. 
Yet these black ants were not born among the 
red ones ; their eggs were laid by their own black 
* Formica sanguinea. + Formica fusca. 
