“What gets me,” said Shorty, “is that the queen seems to be the most important of the whole bunch. What about the king? It must be a regular suffragette colony.”
“Yes,” replied Dick, “in a certain sense it is. The males of the community don’t amount to much. One by one their privileges are taken away from them. They even lose their wings before the females do. After they have taken their flight and safely escorted the queen to her future home they drop out of sight. Their wings fall off and in some cases are pulled off by the more ill-tempered females of the family. They hang around a little while and then drop out of sight altogether. Nobody seems to care what becomes of them. They can’t even get back to the place from which they started. Their wings are gone and they can’t walk. They remind me of the cat—they are so different—the cat came back—the male ants can’t.”
“Gee,” said Jim, “how do the rest get on without them?”
“Oh,” replied Dick, “they don’t seem to mind the males at all. It takes away some of the conceit of the male sex when they see how easily one can get along without them.”
“Well,” said Shorty, who was never partial to work, “they at least get rid of a lot of trouble. How about the carpenter ants, the soldier ants, the foraging ants? Are they all females?”
“Every one of them,” said Dick. “It is a regular colony of Amazons.”
“It seems to me,” said Shorty, “that in all the bunch the queen is the only one who has a snap.”
“Don’t you believe it,” returned Dick, “as a matter of fact, she is the hardest worker of all, that is, at the start. She is the busiest kind of a mother, brings up all the little ants, washing their faces, combing their hair——”
“Oh, say,” interrupted Shorty, “aren’t you putting it a little bit too strong, Dick?”
“Not at all,” said Dick; “here, take up this ant and look at it through the magnifying glass.”