As you may suppose, this is real architectural engineering and no place for amateurs. I once saw a foolish worker starting a roof from the top of one of the side walls without paying any attention to the fact that the other wall was much higher. The result was he struck the middle of it, instead of joining it at the top. Another ant passing, possibly the supervising architect, saw what was going to happen. So what does he do but stop and tear down the other's work and build the ceiling over again!
"There! That's the way to put in a ceiling," he seemed to say. "For goodness sake, where did you learn your trade?"
Huber, the famous student of ants, saw two of these wonderful insects do the very same thing.
Sometimes the situation is such that it is necessary to build a very wide ceiling, so wide that it would fall of its own weight unless supported in some way. Then what would you do; that is, if you were an ant?
"Why, I'd put up pillars to hold it."
That's exactly what the ants do; they put up pillars; but instead of using steel beams, as men do in this day of steel, the ant architects make pillars of clay—build them up with pellets, little clay bricks which they shape with their mandibles—their jaws.
But the ants seem to have some of the methods of steel construction, too; the use of girders and things. Ebrard, a French student of ants, tells how, when a certain roof threatened to fall, some Sir Christopher Wren of the ant world used a blade of grass as a girder, just as Sir Christopher in his day put in girders to support the roof of Saint Paul's Cathedral, and as men use steel girders to-day. The ant fastened a little mass of earth on the end of a grass stalk growing near to bend it over; then gnawed it a little at the bottom to make it bend still more, and finally fixed it with mud pellets into the roof.
But here's something that will make you smile! You have heard about the lazy man down in Arkansas with the hole in his roof? You remember he never mended it in dry weather because it didn't need it, and when it rained he couldn't mend it on account of the rain!
RAINY-DAY WORK IN THE ANT WORLD
Well, these Formica fusca folks are as different from that Arkansas man as anything you could imagine. First of all, being ants, they are anything but lazy; secondly, they never put off needed work on their roofs on account of rain. In fact, they choose the first wet day to do it. As soon as the rain begins they build up a thick terrace on the roof of the old dwelling, carrying in their jaws little piles of finely ground earth which they spread out with their hind legs. Then, by hollowing out this roof, they turn it into a new story. Last of all they put on the ceiling. You see the rain helps them in mixing their clay. There are ants that build up vaulted viaducts or covered ways, and they use clay for that.[13] They make the clay by mixing earth with saliva. Some of these viaducts reach out from the house—the ants' house—to their "cow" pasture.