Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/297

Then the fertilized queen descends to the earth and at once divests herself of her wings, either by pulling them off with her legs and jaws or by rubbing them off against the grass-blades, pebbles or soil. This act of deflation is the signal for important physiological and psychological changes. She is now an isolated being, henceforth restricted to a purely terrestrial existence, and has gone back to the ancestral level of the solitary female Hymenopteron. During her life in the parental nest she stored her body with food in the form of masses of fat and bulky Fig. 2. Head of a Recently Fertilized Queen of Atta sexdens longitudinally bisected; a, mandible; b, labium retracted; c, buccal pocket, containing d, the pellet of fungus hyphæ carried from the parental nest, e, œsophagus, f, oral orifice. (After J. Huber.) wing-muscles. With this physiological endowment and with an elaborate inherited disposition, ordinarily called instinct, she sets out alone to create a colony out of her own substance. She begins by excavating a small burrow, either m the open soil, under some stone or in rotten wood. She enlarges the blind end of the burrow to form a small chamber and then completely closes the opening to the outside world. The labor of excavating often wears away all her mandibular teeth, rubs the hairs from her body and mars her burnished or sculptured armor, thus producing a number of mutilations, which, though occurring generation after generation in species that nest in hard, stony soil, are, of course, never inherited. In the cloistered seclusion of her chamber the queen now passes days, weeks, or even months, waiting for the eggs to mature in her ovaries. When these eggs have reached their full volume at the expense of her fat-body and degenerating, wing-muscles, they are fertilized with a few of the many thousand spermatozoa stored up in her spermatheca and laid. The queen nurses them in a little packet till they hatch as minute larvæ. These she feeds with salivary secretion derived by metabolism from the same source as the eggs, namely, from her fat-body and wing-muscles. The larvæ grow slowly. pupate prematurely and hatch as unusually small but otherwise normal workers. In some species it takes fully ten months to bring such a brood of minim workers to maturity, and during all this time the queen takes no nourishment, but merely draws on her reserve tissues. As soon as the workers mature, they break through the soil and thereby make an entrance to the nest and establish a communication with the outside world. They enlarge the original chamber and continue the excavation in the form of galleries. They go forth in search of food and share it with their exhausted mother, who now exhibits a further and final change in her behavior. She becomes so exceedingly timid