Page:Harvesting ants and trap-door spiders. Notes and observations on their habits and dwellings (IA harvestingantstr00mogg).pdf/26

 carriers. Now these excellent creatures, when they have returned home, and stored their granaries with wheat and barley, bore through each grain of seed in the middle; that which falls off in the process becomes a meal for the ants, and the remainder is unfertile. This these worthy housekeepers do, lest when the rains come the seeds should sprout, as they would do if left entire, and thus the ants should come to want. So we see that the ants have good share in the gifts of nature, in this respect as well as others." Further on he gives a very interesting account of their mode of collecting and preparing the grain, many details of which I can myself substantiate from personal observation, though I have never seen ants actually at work upon the ears of corn. "But when the ants start a foraging, they follow the biggest, who take the lead as generals. And when they come to the crops, the younger ones stand under the stalk, but the leaders ascending gnaw through the culms, as they are called Greek: ouragous], "the stalk ends on which the ears grow" (Lid. and Scott, Gr. Lex.), probably meaning that they detach the separate spikelets of which the ears are composed], of the ears [[Greek: karpimôn, which they throw to the people below. These busy themselves with cutting away the chaff and peeling off the envelopes which contain and cover the grain. So the ants, though they need no threshing time, nor men to winnow for them, nor an artificial draught of wind to separate corn and chaff, yet have the food of men who both plough and sow for it." Ælian appears also to have heard reports of the habits of ants in