Possibly if man had not arisen on the scene, these insects might have developed some sort of civilization like that imagined by Mr. Wells in his story of the moon. We are only concerned with the relations of these ants to plants. Those who are interested in their conquests and civilization must consult the excellent account by Mr. Selous in his Romance of the Insect World.
The most interesting points about them are as follows. They gather a harvest and store it up for the winter. This habit of the ant was well known to the ancients, and is mentioned by Solomon. At the time of the French Encyclopædists, when the fashion of the times was all for destruction and disbelief, the fact that ants do so was ridiculed and flatly contradicted, and especially by the great naturalist Buffon. They pointed out that ants hibernated during the cold weather, and therefore required no food for the winter, so that Solomon's story was absolutely ridiculous.
For nearly a hundred years people forgot that Palestine and those other countries where the habits of ants had been reverently observed possessed a climate much too warm and mild to make the ants hibernate.
After careful study it has been discovered that the ants thoroughly understand the first stages of brewing!
The corn which they gather is not eaten by them in its hard winter condition. When taken into the winter nest of the ants this corn would very soon germinate and grow into a plant, but the ants manage to prevent this by some method which is not yet understood. If such a nest is left alone by the ants, the corn immediately begins to grow, but it is not allowed to do so till it is required for food. Should the store of corn get damp by heavy rain, or mould appear upon it, then the careful ants bring up their store into the sunlight and dry it there.
When it is required for food germination is permitted, but is soon stopped: the ants nibble off the growing rootlet of the seed. Then when the grain absorbs water and begins to change its starch into sugar, the ants suck in the sugar and reap the reward of all this labour and skill.
In the conduct of this germination of the grain they are, of course, far in advance of all the savage races of mankind.
There are certain South American species which go at least one step farther. They have their own fields—spaces three or four feet in diameter—which are entirely occupied by one single grass, the so-called Ant-rice (Aristida stricta). Dr. Lincecum states that the ants "work" these plantations very carefully, removing every weed or other plant that comes up, and sowing every year the new seed at the proper season.[130]
These facts are sufficiently strange and startling, but there are even, apparently, species still more intelligent, who not only sow and reap, but actually prepare a soil and reap a crop of mushrooms, or at least, if not of mushrooms, of fungi. These wonderful little insects gather leaves and cut them into fragments of an appropriate size; they are then collected together so as to form a bed, and the fungus is introduced to this. The fungus is kept at a certain stage of growth by very careful treatment; the fruit-bearing ends are nibbled off, so that the young shoots come up indefinitely. The ants feed upon these fungus shoots, and get a crop indefinitely prolonged.
This is, of course, a system of agriculture far beyond that employed by any tribe of savages. Only man in a relatively advanced stage of agriculture grows mushrooms for himself. These facts, startling as they may seem, are apparently quite well authenticated and have not been seriously questioned.