14. Go To The Ant

In the market-place at Santa Fé, in Mexico, peasant women from the
neighbouring villages bring in for sale trayfuls of living ants, each
about as big and round as a large white currant, and each entirely
filled with honey or grape sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous
Mexican youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The method
of eating them would hardly command the approbation of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is simple and primitive, but
decidedly not humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and
shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is absurdly
distended, and throws away the empty body as a thing with which it has
now no further sympathy. Maturer age buys the ants by the quart, presses
out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very
sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I am credibly
informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment upon it, taken
internally.

The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for the
Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and it
affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that
personal vices are public benefits--_vitia privata humana commoda_. The
honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted
himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a
living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may help
themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to
which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault, and only one
particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from their
expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing honey
within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their
round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules of skin
enclosing the pale amber-coloured honey, these Daniel Lamberts of the
insect race look for all the world like clusters of the little American
Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the
end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday life
the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar-broker, who laid on
flesh and 'adipose deposit' until he became converted at last into a
perfect rolling ball of globular humanity.

The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple. Most of the members
of each community are active and roving in their dispositions, and show
no tendency to undue distension of the nether extremities. They go out
at night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects on
oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin saw, is
fruitful both in sweets and