It was one evening not long after our afternoon on Bungalow Hill,
where Mary had found the mealy-bugs in the runways of an ant's nest
under a stone, and I had told her about the clever little brown ants
and their aphid cattle in the Illinois corn-fields. Ever since that
afternoon Mary had been asking questions about ants, and so this
evening I was translating bits to her from a new German book about
ants. It told about the cruel forays of the hordes of the great
fighting and robbing Ecitons of the Amazons; of the extraordinary
mutually helpful relations between the Aztec ants and the Imbauba tree
of South America, which result in the ants getting a comfortable home
and special food from the tree, while the tree gets protection
through the Aztecs from the leaf-stealing Ecodomas. It told of the
ants that live in the hollow leaves of the Dischidia plants in the
Philippine Islands, and the way the plants get even by sending slender
aerial rootlets into the leaves to feed on the dead bodies of the ants
that die in the nests. It told of the ants in this country that build
sheds of wood-pulp over colonies of honey-dew insects or ant-cattle on
the stems of plants; of the fungus-garden ants of South America and
Mexico and Texas that bite off little pieces of green leaves and make
beds of them in special chambers in their underground nests, so that
certain moulds grow on these leaf-beds and provide a special kind of
food for the ant-gardeners. It told of the ants that make slaves of
other ants, and get to depend so much on these slaves that they can't
even care for their own children, and it told about the honey-ants of
the Garden of the Gods that make some of the workers in each
nest--but that's what this story is going to tell about, so we had
better wait.
But it was all a veritable fairy-story book, as any good book about
the ways and life of ants must be. And Mary listened eagerly. She
liked it. When going-home time came she had, however, one insistent
question to ask. "What can I _see_?" she demanded. "What can I see
right away; to-morrow?"
"Mary you can--see--to-morrow,"--and I think rapidly,--"you can
see--to-morrow,"--still thinking,--"ah, yes--yes you _can_; you can
see them to-morrow."
"But _what_ can I see to-morrow?"
"Why the animated honey-jars; didn't I say what? No? Well, to-morrow
we can go to see them; in the Arboretum at the foot of the big
Monterey pine. I think I remember the exact place."
"But I thought the honey-ants were only in Mexico and New Mexico and
Colorado," says Mary. "Didn't the book say that?"
"Yes, that kind; but we have a kind of our own here in California. The
sort that McCook found in the Garden of the Gods and studied all that
summer twenty-five years ago is found only there and in the Southwest,
but there are two or three other kinds of honey-ants known, and one of
them that has never been told about in the books at all is right here
on the campus. There are several of the nests here, or were a few
years ago, and we'll go to-morrow and try to find one. It will be
fine, won't it?"
"Fine," said Mary. "Good-night."
And so the next morning we went. The Arboretum is a place where once
were planted almost all the kinds of trees that grow wild in
California, besides many other kinds from Australia and Japan and New
Zealand and Peru and Chili and several of the other Pacific Ocean
countries. But the big, swift-growing eucalyptuses and Monterey pines
have crowded out many of the other more tender and less-pushing kinds.
However, it is still a wonderful place of trees. Many birds live
there; swift troops of the beautiful plumed California quails;
crimson-throated Anna humming-birds, crestless California jays,
fidgeting finches and juncos, spunky sparrows and wrens, chattering
chickadees and titmice, fierce little fly-catchers and kinglets. There
are winding paths and little-used roads in it, and altogether it is a
fine place to go when one has only a short hour for walking and seeing
things.
And so Mary and I came with a garden-trowel and a glass fruit-jar to
the foot of the big Monterey pine near the _toyon_. A _toyon_, if you
are an Easterner and need telling, is the tree that bears the red
berries for Christmas for us Pacific-Coasters. It is our holly, as the
Ceanothus is our lilac, and the poison-oak is our autumn-red sumac.
At the foot of the Monterey pine we began our search for the
honey-ants. We didn't, of course, expect to find them walking about
with their swollen bodies full of amber honey, for the honey-bearers
are supposed not to walk around, but to stay inside the nest, in a
special chamber made for them. We looked rather for the
honey-gatherers, the worker foragers.
Pretty soon Mary found a swift little black ant. But, no, it was an
_Aphaenogaster_ that--
"A feeno-gasser?" asks Mary. "What is that?"
"That has the curious, flat-bodied dwarf crickets living with it in
its nests," I continue. "_Myrmecophila_, the ant-lover, they call this
little cricket which has lost its wings and its voice and is
altogether an insignificant and meek little guest unbidden but
tolerated at the ant's table. And here, here is a big black-and-brown
carpenter-ant going home with a seed in its mouth."
"Where is its home? Does it build a house out of wood? Let's follow
it," Mary bursts in.
"No, we are after honey-ants, remember. We mustn't let ourselves get
distracted by all these others. The carpenter-ants do make themselves
a home of wood, but they do it by gnawing out galleries and chambers
in a dead tree trunk or stump or in a neglected timber. That isn't
exactly building, but it is at least a kind of carpentering, a sort
of--"
"Is this one?" interrupts Mary, poking violently at an angry
red-headed little slave-maker ant that seemed anxious to get off to
its home where its slaves, which are other ants captured when still
young and unacquainted with their rightful family, do all the work of
food-getting and cleaning and taking care of the babies.
And then I recognized a _Prenolepis_, that is,--and I _do_ beg
pardon,--one of our campus honey-ants. Of course I suppose they are
elsewhere in California and perhaps north in Oregon and east in Nevada
and Arizona, but I have only seen them here, and hence always think of
them as belonging exclusively with us campus-dwellers. It was a little
brown ant with black hind body and paler under side. It isn't
particularly impressive, for it is only about one-eighth of an inch
long, and its colors and appearance are much like those of many other
ants, but there is something about it sufficiently distinctive to let
one recognize it at sight.
The thing to do now, of course, was to find its nest. There are
various ways of finding the nest of any particular ant you may happen
to discover running about loose over the country, but not one of them
am I going to tell you. They are good things to work out for yourself.
Mary and I know how, and so we had little trouble and didn't
have to spend much time in finding the home of our wandering
_Prenolepis_,--there it is again,--campus honey-ant I mean. And that
is a fair name for it, for McCook who found the famous honey-ants of
the Garden of the Gods in Colorado named his kind _Myrmecocystus
melliger hortusdeorum_, which is straight Latin and Greek for the
"honey-pot ant of the Garden of the Gods." But _what_ a name for a
little ant one-eighth of an inch long to carry!
It would take too many words and I am afraid would be too trivial a
story for even this very happy-go-lucky little book to tell how Mary
and I dug and dug in the ground near the foot of the tree, and how
carefully we worked with our garden-trowel and mostly with our
fingers! And how we traced out runway after runway and opened chamber
after chamber of the honey-ant's nest until we found the honey-pantry
with its strange jars of sweetness all hanging from the roof. The
picture that Mary carefully sketched in, and that Sekko Shimada
painted for us with his dainty Japanese brushes and little saucers of
costly Japanese ink, shows very well part of the nest, that part that
had one of the honey-rooms in. You won't see the base of the Monterey
pine-tree in the picture, nor any of the other trees that were all
around, because Mary didn't put them into her sketch, and we forgot to
tell Sekko where the nest was. But the galleries and honey-chamber and
the ants themselves are all right in Sekko's picture.
In some of the galleries we had found ants with considerably swollen
hind bodies, which evidently had the stomach or crop well filled with
some nearly transparent, pale yellowish-brown liquid. But it was not
until we discovered the honey-pantry that we saw the extraordinary
fully laden real live honey-jars, which were, of course, nothing but
some of the worker ants hanging by their feet from the roof of the
chamber, with their hind bodies enormously swollen by the great
quantity of honey held in the crop. In opening the chamber we
dislodged two or three of the honey-jars that fell to the floor and
could hardly turn over or walk at all, so helpless were they. And one
of them broke and the honey came out in a big drop, and I tasted it on
the tip of my little finger, and it was sweet. So it was surely honey.
And you should have seen how eagerly two or three other workers in the
chamber, without swollen bodies, lapped up this sweet drop that came
out of the body of the poor, broken honey-jar!
As we had broken into the home of the honey-ants and had pretty nearly
wrecked it, it seemed only fair that we should try to help our
honey-ants begin another home under as kindly conditions as possible.
So we put as many of them as we could find, foraging workers,
honey-holders, and the queen whom we found in a special queen room,
into our glass fruit-jar with some soil, and brought them all home and
put them into a formicary. Which is simply an artificial ants' nest,
or house already arranged for ants to live in. It has a place to hold
food and has dark rooms and sunny rooms, cool rooms and warm ones, all
nicely fixed with runways connecting them, and food is put in as often
as necessary and always in one place, which the ants learn to know
very soon, indeed. This makes housekeeping easy and pleasant for the
ants, and lets us see a great deal of how it is carried on, because
there are glass sides and top to the house, so that by lifting little
pieces of black cardboard or cloth we can look in and watch the ants
at work.
The honey-ants' colony seemed to live very contentedly in our
formicary, for they went ahead with all their usual business of laying
eggs and rearing babies and feeding them, and finding honey and
getting the honey-jars loaded with it and hung by their feet from the
ceiling of their room, and all the other things that go on regularly
in a honey-ant's house.
The principal thing we wanted to do, however, was to learn how the
honey-jars got filled and also how they got emptied again! And this
was not at all hard to find out, although we never found out certainly
where the worker foragers got their honey in the Arboretum. McCook
found that his foragers in the Garden of the Gods gathered a sweet
honey-dew liquid that oozed out in little drops from certain live
oak-galls near the nest. But our ants seemed to be getting their honey
from somewhere up in the pine-tree, for there was a constant stream of
them going up and down the trunk. Besides, many of those coming down
had swollen bodies partially filled with honey, while none of those
going up did. Now the only honey supply in the pine-tree that we know
is the honey-dew given off liberally by a brown roundish scale insect
that lives on the pine-needles. So we _think_ our honey-ants gathered
their honey material from these honey-dew scale insects. But we have
seen them collect honey stuff from various aphids and also from the
growing twigs of live-oak trees. They seem to be willing to take it
wherever they can find it.
Of course we had to provide a supply of honey for our indoor colony,
and this supply was eagerly and constantly visited by the foraging
workers. They would lap it up and then go into the nest and feed the
live honey-pots! That is, a well-fed forager would go into the
honey-pantry and force the honey out from its own crop through its
mouth into the mouth of one of the live honey-jars. Undoubtedly the
honey-bee honey we furnished them was considerably changed while in
the body of the foraging worker.
But all the time the nurses and workers inside the nest needed honey
for food. And this they got by going to the honey-pantry, and by some
gentle means inducing the live honey-pots to give up some of their
store. Mouth to mouth the feeder and the filled honey-ant would stand
or cling for some minutes. And there was no doubt of what was going
on. The honey-pot was this time forcing honey out of its own
over-filled crop and into the mouth of the nurse.
Thus all the time there went on a constant emptying and replenishing
of the strange honey-pots. What an extraordinary kind of life! Nothing
to do but to drink and disgorge honey; to cling motionless to the
ceiling of a little room, or lie helpless, or feebly dragging about on
the floor and be pumped into and pumped out of! To have one's body
swollen to several times its natural size by an overloaded stomach,
and to be likely to burst from a fall or deep scratch!
But there is simply no telling beforehand what remarkable condition of
things you may find in an ant's nest. There is an ardent naturalist
student of ants in the great museum of natural history in New York,
who keeps publishing short accounts of the new things he is all the
time discovering about the habits and life of ants. And if I didn't
know him to be not only a perfectly truthful man but a trained and
rigorously careful observer and scientific scholar, I should simply
put his stories aside as preposterous. But on the contrary, as I do
know them to be true, I am more and more coming to be able to believe
anything anybody says or guesses about ants! Which is, of course, not
a good attitude for a professor!
Dr. Wheeler, this New York student of ants, is putting a great deal of
what he knows about ants into a large book which, when published, will
make a whole shelfful of green, red, blue, and yellow fairy books
hide their faded colors in shame. For tellers of fairy tales cannot
even think of things as extraordinary and strange as the things that
ants actually do!
But what a prosaic lecture this story of the animated honey-jars has
come to be. Mary is long ago asleep, curled up in a big leather
arm-chair in my study, and I sit here in the falling dusk, straining
my bespectacled eyes to write what will, I am afraid, only put other
little girls to sleep. Which is not at all my idea in writing this
book. It is, indeed, just the opposite. It is to make anybody who
reads it open his eyes. But, "_Schluss_," as my old Leipzig professor
used to say at the end of his long dreary lecture. So _Schluss_ it is!
[Illustration: HOUSES OF OAK]