"Yes, that kind; but we have a kind of our own here in California. The sort that McCook found in the Garden of the Gods and studied all that summer twenty-five years ago is found only there and in the Southwest, but there are two or three other kinds of honey-ants known, and one of them that has never been told about in the books at all is right here on the campus. There are several of the nests here, or were a few years ago, and we'll go to-morrow and try to find one. It will be fine, won't it?"
"Fine," said Mary. "Good-night."
And so the next morning we went. The Arboretum is a place where once were planted almost all the kinds of trees that grow wild in California, besides many other kinds from Australia and Japan and New Zealand and Peru and Chili and several of the other Pacific Ocean countries. But the big, swift-growing eucalyptuses and Monterey pines have crowded out many of the other more tender and less-pushing kinds. However, it is still a wonderful place of trees. Many birds live there; swift troops of the beautiful plumed California quails; crimson-throated Anna humming-birds, crestless California jays, fidgeting finches and juncos, spunky sparrows and wrens, chattering chickadees and titmice, fierce little fly-catchers and kinglets. There are winding paths and little-used roads in it, and altogether it is a fine place to go when one has only a short hour for walking and seeing things.
And so Mary and I came with a garden-trowel and a glass fruit-jar to the foot of the big Monterey pine near the toyon. A toyon, if you are an Easterner and need telling, is the tree that bears the red berries for Christmas for us Pacific-Coasters. It is our holly, as the Ceanothus is our lilac, and the poison-oak is our autumn-red sumac.
At the foot of the Monterey pine we began our search for the honey-ants. We didn't, of course, expect to find them walking about with their swollen bodies full of amber honey, for the honey-bearers are supposed not to walk around, but to stay inside the nest, in a special chamber made for them. We looked rather for the honey-gatherers, the worker foragers.
Pretty soon Mary found a swift little black ant. But, no, it was an Aphænogaster that—
"A feeno-gasser?" asks Mary. "What is that?"
"That has the curious, flat-bodied dwarf crickets living with it in its nests," I continue. "Myrmecophila, the ant-lover, they call this little cricket which has lost its wings and its voice and is altogether an insignificant and meek little guest unbidden but tolerated at the ant's table. And here, here is a big black-and-brown carpenter-ant going home with a seed in its mouth."
"Where is its home? Does it build a house out of wood? Let's follow it," Mary bursts in.