Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/860

 clung to the hairs of the under lip, and were eagerly lapped up by the hungry ants waiting to be fed. It is probable, however, that these supplies are principally intended as winter stores for the workers, for the feeding of the larvæ, and for the dinner-table of the queen, who is, as usual, too proud or too dignified to do her own foraging.

The working ants take great care of their helpless honey-bearers. When one, through some convulsion of nature—occasioned perhaps by the tap of a gigantic human finger—looses its hold and drops to the floor of its chamber, it is at once picked up by a worker, and carried back to its old foothold on the roof of the apartment. How this minute creature can drag up a perpendicular wall a mass twenty times its own size and weight is only less surprising than it would be to see an adroit climber of the human race ascending the face of a precipice and pulling after him a ton weight.

With regard to the source of the honey, these ants are not known to feast on flowers, like bees and some of our home ants, nor could any evidence be found of the presence of the Aphis, or ant-cow, which many of our ants milk for its honey.

The honey-gatherer is difficult to observe. It is a nocturnal ant, keeping out of sight of the sun during the day, and only venturing forth at nightfall in search of food. Dr. McCook observed them, in the summer twilight, marching outward from the nest in long columns, and pursuing night after night the same paths. He watched them for a considerable time before he succeeded in finding the goal of these nightly expeditions. At length, discovering some ants on the twigs of a species of scrub-oak, which grew abundantly at the foot of the ridge, he observed that they showed a marked preference for certain small oak-galls which were ranged along the sides of the twigs.

The next thing to be done was to examine these galls. We are accustomed to associate galls with the idea of bitterness only, yet they proved to be the true honey-yielders. On the round, green masses minute drops of a sweet juice were found: this the ants eagerly licked up, passing from gall to gall until fully laden, or returning to the original gall at a later hour when fresh sweetness had exuded from it.

The gall-nut, it is well known, is an excrescence upon the leaves of a species of oak; it is produced by the puncture of a small hymenopterous insect for the purpose of depositing its eggs. A minute grub lies in the center of the soft mass which composes the gall. Whether the sweet juice came from this grub, or from the sap of the tree, was not readily to be discovered, though it was most likely an exudation of the sap.

All night the busy gatherers of sweets were occupied in collecting honey from the galls. Toward morning they were seen in great numbers returning to the nest, their bodies swollen with the night's harvest of honey, which, as we have said, is given to the living