Some wonderful facts are recorded concerning matters of personal
cleanliness among ants, and has shown incidentally that these insects
perform amazing feats of acrobatic skill without the least effort, and
quite as matters of course. For example, an ant will often hang from a
grass stem by the claws of one leg, while it combs its antennæ, cleanses
its five remaining feet, or bends its head upwards to lick its abdomen
and furbish the joints of its armor. Indeed, thanks partly to the
wonderful flexibility of its “waist,” and still more to the tenacity of
its muscles, an ant is able to assume and maintain almost any position
that the need or fancy of the moment may prompt.
Many stingless ants, when fighting, first bite their adversary with
their jaws, and then bringing the tip of the abdomen beneath the body,
squirt formic acid into the wound.
=Bees.=--See Domesticated Animals.
=Bumble-bees.=--These common bees are large, somewhat clumsy-looking
insects which live in communities including workers or imperfect
females as well as ordinary members of the two sexes. The nests are
constructed in holes in the ground or other sheltered places, and
the establishment of a community is due in the first instance to the
labors of a queen in early summer. She makes a number of waxen
cells, stores them with honey and pollen, and afterwards feeds the
larvæ when they have devoured these provisions. From the first (and
several other), batches of larvæ workers are chiefly produced, which
undertake the constructive and nursing work, until at last the queen
has nothing to do but lay eggs. Males and other queens are reared
from some of the eggs laid in late summer and early autumn.
=Wasps=, like bees, are either solitary or social, and it is only in
the latter that workers exist. Solitary wasps construct small nests
of clay and little stones, or else make burrows. They possess the
curious habit of storing up immature--for example, caterpillars--or
mature insects, or even spiders, for the benefit of their larvæ when
these hatch out. The kind of victim depends upon the species of the
wasp concerned, but in any case it is killed or paralysed by
stinging.
Social wasps somewhat resemble social bees in their habits, but
their building material, instead of being wax, is a kind of paper
made of chewed wood mixed up with saliva. In some instances the nest
is suspended from a bush or tree, and is provided with a kind of
overhanging roof by which rain is drained off.
In our commonest species, an underground site is chosen, and a
series of combs constructed from above downward, the whole being
enclosed in several layers of wasp paper. Adjacent combs are held
together by little pillars. The young are at first fed upon
fruit-juice, nectar, and other vegetable matter, for which a more
stimulating diet of chewed insects is afterwards substituted.
The HORNET (_Vespa crabro_) is a social wasp which commonly nests in
hollow trees or constructs elaborate nests out of wood fibers,
suspended from boughs. The females have formidable retractile
stings. The hornet is represented in the United States by the
white-faced hornet (_V. maculata_), also a large species.
=FLIES= (_Diptera_)
There are some thirty or forty thousand species of flies known, while no
other order has so many individuals as this. This enormous assemblage of
insects, most of which are small or even minute, includes many species
that have earned an undesirable reputation as bloodsuckers and pests.
Except in fleas and a few others, such as sheep-ticks, there are two
membraneous front wings, the hinder pair serving as sensory structures.
The mouthparts of the female are very often piercing and sucking organs
of great efficiency, the first and second jaws being in the form of
slender lancets protected above and below by the upper and under lip
respectively.
But in other types, such as the house-fly (_Musca domestica_), the jaws
are modified into a proboscis used for sucking juices, and devoid of
powers of perforation.