Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/859

 object: this is to furnish foothold for the clinging feet of certain extraordinary-looking creatures, which form the living honeycombs of which we have spoken.

Fancy an animal with the head and thorax of a small ant, but with all the posterior portion of the body converted into a round sac, of the size of a large pea, and of a rich translucent amber hue—it being, in fact, distended into a reservoir of honey. This honey-bag is immense when compared with the size of the ant, the unchanged parts of which might pass for a black pin's head attached to the side of a marrowfat pea. These odd-looking creatures cling to the roof of the chamber with their feet, the distended honey-bag hanging downward like an amber globe. On seeing them we instinctively imagine that their leg muscles must be developed in a fashion to put to shame those of human athletes, since it is no light weight which they are thus forced to continuously support.

In each chamber of the nest about thirty honey-bearers are found, making some three hundred to the complete nest. Besides these there are hundreds or thousands of others, workers and soldiers, lords and queens, to whom the honey-bearers serve as storehouses of winter food.

Dr. McCook succeeded in bringing some of these home with him alive, providing them with nest-building materials, and with sugar for nutriment. He has one very interesting nest in a glass bottle, with its interior chamber well displayed. The roof of this is covered with depending globules of honey, so large as almost to conceal the minute clinging insect of which they really form a part.

But the marvelous feature of the case yet remains to be described. Not only is the abdomen of the ant converted into a receptacle for honey, but the whole internal economy of the body is transformed for this purpose. All the organs of the abdomen have quite disappeared: viscera, nerves, veins, arteries, have alike vanished; and there remains only a thin, transparent skin, which is capable of great distention. It is thus in reality a honey-cell, and much stranger than that of the bee, the waxen walls of the latter being replaced in this case by the tissues of a living animal. The creature can afford to dispense with the abdominal organs; since its life-duties are so metamorphosed that it has henceforth to act only as an animated sweetmeat.

Dr. McCook's observations enabled him to discover that the working ants, returning from their out-door foraging, with their bodies distended with the honey they have somewhere harvested, enter the chambers of the nest and eject this sweet fluid from their own mouths into the mouths of the honey-bearers, whose bodies become greatly distended with the delicious food. In other oases he perceived hungry ants seeking for a meal from the food thus generously stored up. The honey-bearer seemed to slightly contract the muscles of the abdominal skin, forcing from its mouth minute globules of honey: these