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and sensitive to the light that she hastens to conceal herself on the slightest disturbance to the nest. She becomes utterly indifferent to the young, leaving them entirely to the care of the workers, while she limits her activities to laying eggs and imbibing liquid food from the tongues of her attendants. This copious nourishment soon restores her depleted fat-body, but her disappearing wing muscles have left her thoracic cavity hollow and filled with gases which cause her to float when placed in water. With this circumscribed activity she lives on, sometimes to an age of fifteen years, as a mere egg-laying machine. The current reputation of the ant queen is derived from such old, abraded, toothless, timorous queens found in well-established colonies. But it is neither chivalrous nor scientific to dwell exclusively on the limitations of these decrepit beldames without calling to mind the charms and self sacrifices of their younger days.

Now to bring up a family of even very small children without eating anything and entirely on substances abstracted from one's own tissues is no trivial undertaking. Of the many thousands of ant queens annually impelled to enter on this ultra-strenuous life, very few survive to become mothers of colonies. The vast majority, after starting their shallow burrows, perish through excessive drought, moisture or cold, the attacks of parasitic fungi or subterranean insects, or start out with an