But all the time the nurses and workers inside the nest needed honey for food. And this they got by going to the honey-pantry, and by some gentle means inducing the live honey-pots to give up some of their store. Mouth to mouth the feeder and the filled honey-ant would stand or cling for some minutes. And there was no doubt of what was going on. The honey-pot was this time forcing honey out of its own over-filled crop and into the mouth of the nurse.
Thus all the time there went on a constant emptying and replenishing of the strange honey-pots. What an extraordinary kind of life! Nothing to do but to drink and disgorge honey; to cling motionless to the ceiling of a little room, or lie helpless, or feebly dragging about on the floor and be pumped into and pumped out of! To have one's body swollen to several times its natural size by an overloaded stomach, and to be likely to burst from a fall or deep scratch!
But there is simply no telling beforehand what remarkable condition of things you may find in an ant's nest. There is an ardent naturalist student of ants in the great museum of natural history in New York, who keeps publishing short accounts of the new things he is all the time discovering about the habits and life of ants. And if I didn't know him to be not only a perfectly truthful man but a trained and rigorously careful observer and scientific scholar, I should simply put his stories aside as preposterous. But on the contrary, as I do know them to be true, I am more and more coming to be able to believe anything anybody says or guesses about ants! Which is, of course, not a good attitude for a professor!
Dr. Wheeler, this New York student of ants, is putting a great deal of what he knows about ants into a large book which, when published, will make a whole shelfful of green, red, blue, and yellow fairy books hide their faded colors in shame. For tellers of fairy tales cannot even think of things as extraordinary and strange as the things that ants actually do!
But what a prosaic lecture this story of the animated honey-jars has come to be. Mary is long ago asleep, curled up in a big leather arm-chair in my study, and I sit here in the falling dusk, straining my bespectacled eyes to write what will, I am afraid, only put other little girls to sleep. Which is not at all my idea in writing this book. It is, indeed, just the opposite. It is to make anybody who reads it open his eyes. But, "Schluss," as my old Leipzig professor used to say at the end of his long dreary lecture. So Schluss it is!
