taining hundreds of thousands of members. Ants of one community are not friendly with those of another; either they have nothing to do with them or quarrel with them. The work of a community is wonderfully portioned out. There are big workers and little workers. In some species there is a class that does the fighting, a soldier class. In a colony are the females, which are largest in size; the males; and the workers or nurses, which are the smallest.
After the pairing season the males are allowed to stray away and soon die. The females and workers are very long-lived. The queens are carefully guarded by the workers, but occasionally one of them escapes and founds a colony. There are four builders of their wonderful colonies with their houses and streets, by processes of mining, masonry and carpentry. The mining ants dig long galleries in the clay, removing the rubbish, building pillars to support the work and covering the whole with a thatch of grass stems. The red and yellow field-ants are the masons. They first raise pillars and then spring arches over them, covering them with thfc loose piles of soil which we know as ant-hills. The carpenter ants bore their cells in the solid timber of trees, side by side, with partitions no thicker than paper. A kind of ant in Australia builds its houses of leaves fastened together with a kind of glue. Ants are very strong, carrying animals for stages in the life history of ants: egg, larva, pupa and perfect insect.
Horse Ant (natural size). 9 Worker. 10 Male, 11 Female.
The eggs are laid by the queen and carried about by the workers or nurses, exposed to the sunlight during the day and protected from the dampness at night. As soon as the white, legless larvae are hatched, they are treated in the same way, being fed by a liquid from the stomach of the nurse, until they reach the proper age to spin their own cocoons around them. The cocoons repi^sent the pupa stage; they are commonly called ant-eggs, and are carefully tended by the workers. When ready for their second birth, the young ants are cut out of the inclosing cells.
The workers are the most interesting of the three classes of ants. Besides acting as nurses, they supply all the food and are the food, or masses of material several times larger than themselves. They eat various kinds of food, both vegetable and animal, other insects, honey, sugar, fruit, etc. They are fond of the honey-dew produced by little insects called aphides, and some kinds of ants capture these insects and use them as milch - cows. Many ants live on decaying vegetable and animal matter. In some hot countries are large, flesh-eating ants, which move in swarms over the land, searching for insects of all kinds, each carrying his prey. In South America, when a swarm is seen approaching, the people leave their houses and let the ants clear out the insects which infest them. In Texas is a kind of farming ant, which is said to plant, cultivate and harvest a kind of grain, laying it up in cells
