Page:A Naturalist on the Prowl.djvu/211

Rh 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 not 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, however, 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.