Page:Harvesting ants and trap-door spiders. Notes and observations on their habits and dwellings (IA harvestingantstr00mogg).pdf/31

 to maintain a clean crop of this plant around its nest, suffering no weed to appear among it, and harvesting the crop in its proper season.

The Sauba ant (Œcodoma cephalotes) has been seen by Mr. Bates plundering baskets containing mandioca meal (an impure form of tapioca) in Brazil, and this in so wholesale a manner as shortly to threaten the loss of the entire supply; and Dr. Delacoux records the presence in New Granada of a monstrous ant, called by the natives Arieros, a word which, I am informed, is of Arabic extraction, and means the carrier, which emptied an entire sack of maize belonging to him in a single night.

It seems strange that while travellers have reported the seed-storing habits of ants in far distant countries, our naturalists at home should have not only remained unaware of its existence in Europe, but even strenuously denied it. It is certain, however, that naturalists and others in southern Europe are more or less aware of the fact, but I have been unable to learn that any accurate account of the habits of harvesting ants has hitherto been published, or that any one has taken pains to discover what becomes of the seed so laboriously obtained.

It is true that in the Enciclopedia Popolare extracts are given from the remarks made by M. Gené on the subject, in which he assumes that the fact that ants collect and carry to their nest large supplies of grain and seed is well known, but states that he is at