14. Go To The Ant - Page 2

bitters, _melle et felle_. This nectar they
then carry home, and give it to the rotunds or honey-bearers, who
swallow it and store it in their round abdomen until they can hold no
more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of
bursting. They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' chiefly
in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their
residence. When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the
nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antennæ. The
honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop
of the amber liquid. ('Regurgitates' is a good word which I borrow from
Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants; and it
saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a respectable
periphrasis.) The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three
at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and lapping nectar
together from the lips of their devoted comrade. This may seem at first
sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part of the ants; but after
all, how does it really differ from our own habit of eating honey which
has been treated in very much the same unsophisticated manner by the
domestic bee?

Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit of
the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening some nests in the Garden of
the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the rotunds,
which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store
of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants, tempted away
from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons and young grubs,
clustered around their unfortunate companion, like street boys around a
broken molasses barrel, and, instead of forming themselves forthwith
into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the
honey from their dying brother. On the other hand it must be said, to
the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions)
they never desecrate the remains of the dead. When a honey-bearer dies
at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers
carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings,
clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey
their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments, to the formican
cemetery, undisturbed. If they chose, they might only bury the front
half of their late relation, while they retained his remaining moiety
as an available honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding
ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are 'pulled
up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along
with the juiceless