The honey which the rotunds, as McCook calls them, receive from the workers is gathered at night, and is obtained almost entirely from the galls of oak trees, which, when pierced by the ant’s mandibles, exude a white transparent liquid in minute globules. This is greedily licked up by the ants and distributed by them after the return home, not only to the rotunds, but to such of their fellow-workers as may not have taken part in the expedition.[[83]] The honey thus obtained is pleasant to ant and human taste alike, and the Indians of New Mexico, as no doubt elsewhere, obtain it by the simple process of squeezing the insect—breaking the honey-jar, as one may say. They also make from it a fermented liquor having intoxicating powers, so that one need not wonder that the idea of farming the honey-ant, like the honey-bee, has been seriously discussed in the United States. McCook, however, has pointed out that “the limited quantity of the product would prevent a profitable industry,” and he adds: “Besides, the sentiment against the use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is worthy of all respect, would not be overcome.”[[83]] Personally I think it would be overcome, and pretty quickly, too, as are most other sentiments that stand in the way of pleasure or profit. Women would get it under first, as in the case of birds, seals, etc., and the world would soon follow, with “woman’s influence” upon its lips. But let me not be unjust. I do not believe in sentiment as a working force in the case at all. If the ants are not to be squeezed it will be on commercial considerations.
That the worker-ants—and for that matter the others also—are extremely fond of the honey so curiously stored by them, will be easily believed, and an unpleasant illustration of their greediness in this respect was often observed by McCook when capturing a nest. The swollen bodies of the rotunds, on these occasions, were sometimes unavoidably ruptured, whereupon such workers as happened to be near these unfortunates, forgetting their alarm, which had hitherto been great, and the ruin and confusion all around them, paused in their flight, or aimless movements, and greedily lapped up the overflowing honey.[[84]] It is all the more interesting, therefore, to learn that when the “little life” of these poor honey-pots is at length “rounded with a sleep,” their contained treasure, though so easily obtainable, goes with them to the grave, the idea of opening the full crop, and imbibing the contents, never seeming to occur to any ant. This is all the more remarkable in that the workers, when they recognise that life is extinct, carefully separate the abdomen from the thorax by sawing through, with their mandibles, the little connecting stalk called the petiole. The two parts are then removed separately, that representing the head half being carried, whilst the “golden bowl” of the body “unbroken,” though with “the spirit fled for ever,” is rolled along the various chambers and galleries of the nest, till it finally finds a resting-place in the cemetery just beyond its precincts.[[84]] To what are we to attribute the non-utilisation of the honey in the dead body? Even were it possible that the ants could forget that it was there, they cannot be unconscious of what must be smelt, as well as seen, through the semi-transparent walls of the abdomen. Some feeling must restrain them—what, I am not prepared to say in a work which does not aim at being scientific.
Here, then, we have one most suggestive illustration—“suggestive,” I think, is a very useful word—of the funeral habits of ants. Many others could be instanced, but I will end this chapter, and small account of ant doings, generally, with the following extract from the Proceedings of the Linnæan Society (1861). The observer was a Mrs. Hutton, of Sydney; and Romanes, who quotes her account in his Animal Intelligence, remarks that though she is not a well-known observer the facts reported were such as scarcely to admit of a mistake. Personally, I attach no weight whatever to anybody’s not being known as an observer. Want of leisure, or unpropitious circumstances generally, must prevent large numbers of people from seeing what they would be very well able to note accurately if they did, or from recording what they do see; whilst, on the other hand, leisure, joined to taste in a certain direction, makes many a quite average observer known as a good one. A good observer, in fact, is rather one who is always keeping on, and does not weary, than one who can see a single salient thing more plainly than most other people; and, again, it is easy to set a fictitious value merely on being before the public.
Having thus defended Mrs. Hutton, I proceed now to quote her account: “I saw,” she says, “a large number of ants surrounding the dead ones” (soldier ants which she had herself killed and left lying on the ground some half-hour previously), “and determined to watch their proceedings closely. I followed four or five that started off from the rest towards a hillock a short distance off, in which was an ants’ nest. This they entered, and in about five minutes they reappeared, followed by others. All fell into rank, walking regularly and slowly, two by two, until they arrived at the spot where lay the dead bodies of the soldier ants. In a few minutes two of the ants advanced and took up the dead body of one of their comrades; then two others, and so on, until all were ready to march. First walked two ants bearing a body, then two without a burden; then two others with another dead ant, and so on, until the line was extended to about forty pairs, and the procession now moved slowly onwards, followed by an irregular body of about two hundred ants. Occasionally the two laden ants stopped, and laying down the dead one, it was taken up by the two walking unburdened behind them, and thus, by occasionally relieving each other, they arrived at a sandy spot near the sea. The body of ants now commenced digging with their jaws a number of holes in the ground, into each of which a dead ant was laid, where they now laboured on until they had filled up the graves. This did not quite finish the remarkable circumstances attending this funeral of the ants. Some six or seven individuals had attempted to run off without performing their share of the task of digging; these were caught and brought back, when they were at once attacked by the body of ants and killed upon the spot. A single grave was quickly dug, and they were all dropped into it.”
“Prodigious!” as Dominie Sampson would have said, and certainly I think this is one of the most remarkable observations upon ants that has ever been made. As far as the burying is concerned, it has been corroborated by the Rev. W. Farrar White, who, at the same time, corroborates Pliny; but how strange are all the circumstances! What was it, one wonders, that made just a few of the crowd shirk their share of the labour—for this is not like ants. Some strange, uncanny feeling in connection with the dead bodies may be suspected; but seeing that, as the Russian proverb truly says, “Another man’s soul is darkness,” it is not very likely that we shall ever know what ants feel.
One interesting question is suggested in this connection, though I have never known it raised yet. Two views of what ants are, excluding compromises, may be taken—the automatic one, tempered with “psychic plasticity,” of Professor Wheeler, and that formed by Mr. Belt, who, having fully satisfied himself—from the keenest observation, be it remembered—of their reasoning powers and capacities, remarks, “When we see these intelligent insects dwelling together in orderly communities of many thousands of individuals, their social instincts developed to a high degree of perfection, making their marches with the regularity of disciplined troops, showing ingenuity in the crossing of difficult places, assisting each other in danger, defending their nests at the risk of their own lives, communicating information rapidly to a great distance, making a regular division of work, the whole community taking charge of the rearing of the young, and all imbued with the strongest sense of industry, each individual labouring not for itself alone, but for all its fellows, we may imagine that Sir Thomas More’s description of Utopia might have been applied with greater justice to such a community than to any human society.”[[85]] Now, if Belt’s view be the correct one, or if the evidence in favour of it be at all strong, is it not time for us to ask ourselves, merely as a moral problem, how far we, in our clumsy and imperfect human state, have a right to kill ants and tumble Utopia to pieces, simply for our amusement, intellectual or otherwise? Ought we to do this? Or ought we, like a lady who lives in America and writes to very scientific papers, to imprison queens who do no harm, and make ourselves learned at the expense of one, or both of their antennæ, during the term of their natural lives? However simply and sweetly we may talk of this, however much true womanly feeling may enter into the narrative, nay, even though we give the queens pet names, is it really right?
CHAPTER XVIII
Bees and wasps—A bee’s masonry—What happens to caterpillars—Living food—Variations in instinct—A wasp’s implement—Unreal distinctions—A cautious observer—Bees that make tunnels—A wonderful instinct—Leaf-cutting bees—Nests made of poppy-leaves—Born in the purple—Commercial philosophy—The appreciative white man—Economy of labour—Bees and rats—Busy shadows—A bee double.