The shape of the granary chambers varies considerably, as may be seen by reference to the drawing of three floors given in [Plate III.], p. 23, and that shown diagrammatically in the woodcut on next page, where the white space represents the granary floor, and the dark circular spot in the centre, the aperture of a gallery leading downwards.
I once had an opportunity of seeing a large portion of a nest of the red-headed variety of barbara laid bare by a cutting recently made through a bank at Cannes in digging the foundations of a house, which exposed a very extensive and complicated series of galleries and granaries. The lowest point at which I detected the workings of the ants was at twenty inches below the surface of the ground, and here granaries containing seeds in abundance were present, and the galleries and granaries extended over a space measuring 5ft. 9in. in a horizontal direction. In two cases I have found nests of Atta barbara at Mentone which were carried far into the living rock in places where it happened to be of an even grain, and not gritty or pebbly as it frequently is. It was quite by chance that I first discovered this very interesting fact, having tracked a train of seed-bearing workers to a part of the sandstone rock where steps had quite recently been hacked out leading to some terraces.
Plate V.
I soon saw that the ants entered and came out from three or four small passages in the cleft surface of the rock, and that their nest actually lay in the sandstone itself. Having contrived to wedge off several large flakes of the rock, which was soft in most places and might be scooped out with a strong knife, I discovered that though some of the passages of the ants followed the lines of cleavage and the cracks made by the fine wiry fibres of the bushes growing on the surface, others were frequently made in the form of tubular tunnels through the living rock. Without the aid of hammer and chisel it was not possible to follow the galleries and to secure specimens of the mined rock; but on the next day (Dec. 7th) I returned armed with tools, and with the assistance of a friend[30] quarried out a portion of the nest, tracing it down eventually to twenty-three inches below the surface of the rock in a vertical, and to about sixteen inches away from the surface in a horizontal direction.
[30] I take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to Mr. Robert Lightbody for help on this and other occasions.
At one point where the rock was almost entirely solid and without flaw or crevice, and where it was clear that the passages were entirely the work of the ants, we measured a tunnel by worming a straw down it, and found it to be ten inches in length. We subsequently traced this tunnel or rock gallery down until it communicated with a chamber filled with winged ants and seeds of several kinds. This granary was horizontal, and merely an enlargement of an ordinary gallery of a compressed spindle-shape, flattened from above downwards, measuring as nearly as I could estimate three inches in length, by a trifle less than an inch in breadth, and half an inch in height. The walls were tolerably smooth, but not prepared or glazed in the way that certain small terminal cells which I shall shortly describe were. The surfaces, however, had a very different appearance to that of the surrounding sandstone, being of a darker and brownish colour, and seeming to be coated with some kind of dressing or cement.
One of these tunnels at first took a horizontal course for two and a half inches, then descended vertically for an inch and a half to a point where it made two horizontal branches, and from these latter several other vertical galleries descended, two of which we were able to trace until they expanded into a cluster of small pear-shaped cells, the walls of which were quite smooth and very carefully laid with plates of mica and cement. I was able to draw this on the spot, Fig. A, [Plate V.], while Mr. Lightbody worked it out piecemeal with hammer and chisel. It was unfortunately impossible to secure more than very imperfect fragments as specimens. These terminal cells were empty when we came to them, but it is quite possible that the ants may have conveyed away larvæ or winged ants from them, having received abundant notice of the coming danger from the continued jarring of the chisel-work.