—Proverbs 6:6.
THE LITTLE FARMERS WITH SIX FEET
I don't believe I've ever heard anybody say anything against an angleworm; although not many people, even to this day, I'll be bound, realize what a useful citizen the angleworm is.
But now we come to a class of farmers that, as a class, are positively disliked; farmers that nobody has a good word for, that nobody wants for neighbors. The charge against them is that, like the man in the Bible, they are always reaping where they have not sown; always helping themselves to other people's crops—bushels of wheat, bushels of rye, tons of cotton, loads of hay and apples and peaches and plums; and nice garden vegetables; and even the trees in the wood lot. It is estimated, for instance, that the chinch-bug helps himself every year to $30,000,000 worth of Uncle Sam's grain; while other insects make away with 10 per cent of his hay crop, 20 per cent of mother's garden vegetables, $10,000,000 worth of father's tobacco; and the Hessian fly sees to it that between 10 and 25 per cent of the farmer's wheat never gets to mill.
"Yes, and sometimes it's 50-50 between the farmer and the fly," said the high school boy, who often spends his vacation with a country cousin.
Then there are insects that injure and destroy forest trees because they like to eat the leaves or the wood itself; and some 300 kinds of insects that make themselves free with other people's orchards.
I. Considering the Ant
But, as I said a few moments ago, it takes all sorts of people to make a world; and as there are good and bad citizens among men, so there are good and bad among insects. Indeed there are so many useful insects that help make or fertilize the soil by grinding up earth and burying things in it, that even this chapter, which is rather long, as you see, can't begin to tell about all of them. So suppose we give our space to a few by way of example, and then look up others in other books in the library.
AMOUNT OF WORK DONE BY ANTS
First of all let us consider the ways of the ant (as the Bible tells us to). The ant's work may be said to take up where the earthworm leaves off. Mr. Earthworm, as we have seen, is a little fastidious about the kind of land he tills. Among other things, he is inclined to avoid sandy soil, while the ants will be found piling up their pretty cones of sand or clay as well as of black earth. And in some soils the ants do more important work than the worm that helped make Mr. Darwin famous. In the course of a single year they may bring fresh soil to the surface to the average depth of a quarter of an inch over many square miles. This not only helps to keep the farmer's fields fertile by adding fresh, unused earth, but enriches them by burying the vegetation—such as leaves and twigs and branches broken from dead trees by storms—so that it decays. This burying of vegetation is the very thing the good farmer does when he spreads his fields with manure from the barnyard, or when he ploughs under the stubble.