10. Honey-Dew

Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personæ, a couple of small
brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green
'plant-lice,' or 'blight,' or aphides. The exact scene is usually on the
young and succulent branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft
shoots the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts, in
search of the sap off which they live so contentedly through their brief
lifetime. To them, enter the two small brown ants, their lawful
possessors; for ants, too, though absolutely unrecognised by English law
('de minimis non curat lex,' says the legal aphorism), are nevertheless
in their own commonwealth duly seised of many and various goods and
chattels; and these same aphides, as everybody has heard, stand to them
in pretty much the same position as cows stand to human herdsmen. Throw
in for sole spectator a loitering naturalist, and you get the entire
_mise-en-scène_ of a quaint little drama that works itself out a dozen
times among the wilted rose-trees beneath the latticed cottage windows
every summer morning.

It is a delightful sight to watch the two little lilliputian proprietors
approaching and milking these their wee green motionless cattle. First
of all, the ants quickly scent their way with protruded antennæ (for
they are as good as blind, poor things!) up the prickly stem of the
rose-bush, guided, no doubt, by the faint perfume exhaled from the
nectar above them. Smelling their road cautiously to the ends of the
branches, they soon reach their own particular aphides, whose bodies
they proceed gently to stroke with their outstretched feelers, and then
stand by quietly for a moment in happy anticipation of the coming
dinner. Presently, the obedient aphis, conscious of its lawful master's
friendly presence, begins slowly to emit from two long horn-like tubes
near the centre of its back a couple of limpid drops of a sticky pale
yellow fluid. Honey-dew our English rustics still call it, because, when
the aphides are not milked often enough by ants, they discharge it
awkwardly of their own accord, and then it falls as a sweet clammy dew
upon the grass beneath them. The ant, approaching the two tubes with
cautious tenderness, removes the sweet drops without injuring in any way
his little _protégé_, and then passes on to the next in order of his
tiny cattle, leaving the aphis apparently as much relieved by the
process as a cow with a full hanging udder is relieved by the timely
attention of the human milkmaid.

Evidently, this is a case of mutual accommodation in the political
economy of the ants and aphides: a free interchange of services between
the ant as consumer and the aphis as producer. Why the aphides should
have