a was an ant, who seldom stood still,
and who made a nice nest in the side of a hill.
—edward lear.
“sh!” said ruth to the audience in general, for she wanted very much to hear what the ant had to say. the ant looked at her approvingly, and then said in a very solemn tone:
“my friends, there are ants and ants.”
“who doesn’t know that?” snapped mrs. horntail.
“yes, there are ants and ants,” repeated the speaker, not noticing the interruption. “there is the carpenter ant, for one. in the books she is called componotis pennsylvanicus, but never mind the name. it doesn’t seem to hurt her. she makes her nest in the trunks of trees, old buildings, logs, and places of that kind. you can see her on the leaf by mrs. saw fly. she is large and black and——”
“clean,” finished the carpenter ant, speaking for herself, and, without asking further permission, she poised on her hind legs and began to ply her tongue, and the fine and coarse combs on her fore legs, until she had gone over her whole body, smoothing out ruffled hairs, and getting rid of every atom of soil. her toilet done, she gave a few leisurely strokes, then drew her fore legs through her mouth to clean the combs, and stretched herself with an air of satisfaction.
“i hope i haven’t interrupted the proceedings,” she said, “but if i am not clean i am miserable. now, miss lassius brunens, please go on.”
“miss who?” asked the little brown ant. “oh, i see. you are calling me by the name the wise men give me. well, i can stand it. to continue: i have mentioned the carpenter ant, and there are also the mound builders. everybody knows their big hills. then there are ants who keep slaves, and live under stones, and there are honey ants, who live in the south and use the abdomens of their own sisters to store honey in, and there are ants who sow seed and harvest it, and ants who cut pieces from green leaves and carry them as parasols, and soldier ants and——”
“oh, give us a rest!” broke in mrs. horntail. “i am tired of ants.”
“jealous, you mean,” said the little brown ant, “because you are not as wise as we are. maybe you don’t know that whole books have been written about us and our clever doings. and men have spent years and years trying to study our ways. now my family may not be the most wonderful, but i think it is the best known. we are the little ants who make the hill with a hole in the middle, which you so often see on sandy paths, or roadsides, or in dry fields.”
ruth had edged closer, and was listening eagerly. once more the little ant looked at her approvingly, then went on:
“some people think our houses are queer, because they are dark. of course we have no windows, only a door, and that is a hole in the roof. we like it so though, and you might be surprised if you could see our many wonderful galleries and chambers. we made them all too. dug them out of the earth, with our feet, throwing the soil out behind us, until the burrow grew too deep. then we had to take it out grain by grain. we made our pillars and supports also, using damp earth for mortar. we don’t mind work, but we do mind human giants carelessly putting their feet in the middle of our hill and breaking in upon our private life. those accidents will happen though, and our first thought is always the babies. they have no legs, and we have no hands, so we take them in our jaws, and speed away with them to our underground chambers, where they will be safe. i have seen human babies carried when they did have legs. there is no excuse for that.
“another thing, i know better than to call a human baby an egg, but, would you believe me, there are lots of people who think our babies are eggs. i have heard them called so. now the reason we are so careful of our babies is because if there were no babies there would be no ants, and that brings me to the queen, for without her there would be no babies, because there would be no eggs, and babies always begin by being eggs. only the queen lays eggs, remember that. she is important for this reason, and no other. she is not our ruler, as some suppose. in fact, we have no ruler. ants do as they please, but they usually please to do what is best for the whole community. we have many queens, but they are not jealous of each other, as the bee queens are. they do not look like us workers. they are ever so much larger, and were hatched with wings. the males also have wings, but it really matters very little what they have. they are such a weakly set, and after they go abroad with the queens, when they take the one flight of their lives, they usually die, or something eats them, and so they are settled. it is the queens who interest us. some of them we never see again. they go off somewhere and start new colonies, or something may eat them too, but those that come back either unhook their wings, or we do it for them. then they settle down and begin to lay eggs. their egg laying is not after the fashion of bee queens, who go to certain cells and leave eggs in them. the ants drop their eggs as they walk around.”
“don’t they get lost?” asked ruth.
“no, indeed. workers follow and pick 168up every one. they take good care of those precious eggs, too, and when they hatch into helpless grubs, without wings or feet, our work begins in earnest. every morning we carry them into the sunshine, and bring them down again at night. we fondle them too, and keep them clean by licking them all over. then of course they must be fed, and, like other babies, they prefer milk.”
“and i know where you get the milk!” cried ruth, all excitement. “it is from the aphides, isn’t it? the cicada told me. the aphides are his cousins. he doesn’t think so much of them, but he says you do.”
“well, why shouldn’t we? they give us the most delicious milk. we have a fine herd of aphides now pasturing on a stalk of sweetbrier, and when winter comes we will keep their eggs down in our nest, and put them on the sweetbrier in the spring, so that the little aphides which hatch from them will have plenty to eat. yes, and we may even 169build tiny sheds for them to keep their enemies from reaching them.”
“i wonder if you intend to talk all day?” broke in a sharp voice. “i sha’n’t wait another minute.”
it was not mrs. horntail, as ruth thought at first, but madame vespa maculata, or, in plain english, the white-faced hornet, and, as she was a fiery lady, no one disputed her when she said:
“i am the largest and most distinguished of my family, and i build a nest whose delicacy and beauty make it a wonderful piece of insect architecture. it is proper that i should speak first, and i will speak right now.”
“speak, by all means,” said the little ant. “i have quite finished.”
“then move,” answered vespa; “i need space.”
the whole audience gave it to her, including ruth, who did not edge up close, as she did to the other speakers.
“it is this way,” she whispered to belinda. “those sharp people are very interesting, but it is better not to get too near until you know them quite well.”
“i suppose,” madame vespa was saying, “i suppose we wasps can scarcely be called general favourites. we have a sting, you see, but, my friends, that was intended for laying eggs, and if we use it on people it is because they meddle in our business. it is our way. we will sting those who bother us. now, in our community—for we are social wasps—the female is unquestionably the better half. we have our rights and we insist on them. my mate was a good-for-nothing fellow, like the rest of them. i didn’t marry him until fall, and he soon left me, and did nothing but perch around in the sunshine with others like him, and i had all the hard work of the home. finally he died. i suppose he couldn’t help that, but i doubt if he would have made an effort anyhow. well, reproaches are of no use now, for he is very much dead by this time. i have had a whole winter’s sleep since i saw him last. we queen wasps always sleep in winter. we are the only ones of the colony who do not die when cold weather comes. you see, our community is not like the bees. it lasts only for a summer, and each spring the queens wake up and start a new one. that was what i did. i slept in the crevice of a barn and left it full of plans. you can imagine the task before me, but i was plucky and soon chose a tree to suit me. my house was made of paper, and i should like to say right here that we wasps are the first paper makers in the world, for while egypt still traced her records in stone, or on the inner bark of the papyrus, my ancestors were manufacturing paper, that man has finally learned to make in the same way. for paper is only vegetable fibre reduced to a pulp and pressed into sheets.”
ruth’s eyes were wide with astonishment, and she was edging nearer to madame vespa.
“can you really make paper out of wood?” she asked.
“of course. see my jaws? they are made to chew wood. not decayed wood either. that may do for wasps who live under ground, for the brownish paper it makes isn’t strong enough to stand exposure. i choose good wood, and i make fine gray paper.”
“i wish you would tell me how you do it,” begged ruth.
“why, i simply gnaw the wood with my powerful jaws, and chew it until it is a pulpy mass, then i spread it in a sheet, wherever i wish it, and smooth and pat it with my feet. see how flat they are? i have heard of people beginning their houses at the cellar and building up. i consider that perfectly ridiculous. i always begin at the top. first, i make a slender stem or support to fasten the nest to the tree. then i make three or more six-sided cells, which i hang from the support, and lay an egg in each, fastening it in with glue, for the open side of the cell is down. after this i enclose my cells with a wall of paper, and by this time, i am glad to say, my children begin to hatch, and though at first they look like horrid little worms, who can’t help themselves at all, i always know they will grow like me soon, and do a great deal of work.
“feeding them isn’t an easy job, i can tell you, especially when it is added to my other duties, but, after a while, each baby weaves a little silken door over its cell, and goes to sleep. when she wakes she is a wasp, and the first thing she does is to wash her face and polish her antennæ, nor is it long before she gets to work. my first children are always workers, and after a number of them are hatched i can give my whole time to laying eggs.”
“but when the nest is once done?” began ruth, who had forgotten her fear entirely and was now quite close to madame vespa.
“the nest done?” repeated the fiery lady. “you should know that our nest is never done. new cells must be added, old walls gnawed down, and fresh ones built up to enclose larger combs. indeed, we are never idle. we ventilate as the bees do, and we have sentinels too. later in the season i lay eggs that hatch out drones, and last of all, the queen eggs. they are——”
“now you would think,” said a yellow jacket, buzzing up excitedly, “you would really think that vespa might mention the fact that other wasps exist, but not she. now i want to tell you, the white-faced hornet isn’t the whole thing. there are yellow jackets too.”
“we have eyes,” said madame vespa, “but go ahead and talk, and get through, for pity’s sake.”
“yes, i mean to talk, and i shall get through when i please. we always insist that people shall respect our rights, and they generally do or—something happens. our nests are quite as remarkable as vespa’s, though we do not hang them from trees, as she is in the habit of doing. our cousin, mrs. polistes, also makes a paper nest, but she builds only a layer of cells, with not a sign of a wall about them. any one can look right in on her private life.”
“i’m quite willing they should,” spoke up mrs. polistes, a long, slender brown wasp, with a yellow line around her body. “i could wall up my house if i wished to, but i don’t and i won’t; so there.”
“they all have awful tempers, haven’t they?” said ruth to mrs. horntail.
“tempers?” repeated that lady. “they are perfect pepper pots, though i must say mrs. polistes isn’t usually as bad as the others.”
“i am talking,” called the yellow jacket, “and the rest of the audience will please keep still. as i was saying, though i doubt if you all heard it, there are other members of our family who have not been mentioned yet. we have miners, masons, and carpenters just like the bees. of course they are solitary, and——”
“i object!” interrupted mrs. muddauber. “i won’t be bunched in with ever so many others. i will speak for myself.”
she was quite graceful, with a waist as slender as a thread, but she jerked her wings about in such a nervous and fidgety fashion that mrs. horntail declared she must have st. vitus’s dance.
“i haven’t any such thing,” answered mrs. muddauber, angrily. “i haven’t any time to dance. i’m nervous, that’s all. anybody would be nervous with all the work i have to do, and my mate such a lazy fellow that he never thinks of lending me a helping mandible in making my home. he says he doesn’t live very long, and wants to enjoy himself while he can. speaking of houses, i don’t approve of paper ones. i always make mine of mud. i’m a mason, you see. i get one room finished, and lay an egg in it. then i go to market to get my baby’s dinner.”
“but you haven’t any baby,” objected mrs. horntail. “your egg doesn’t hatch as soon as it is laid, i know that.”
“what of it? the egg will be a baby sometime, and the baby will be hungry. he will not be a vegetarian either. he will want meat. juicy spiders are what he prefers, and he likes them fresh. now if i should kill them they would be anything but fresh when he is ready to eat them, so i merely sting them until they are quite paralyzed, then i put them in the room with my egg and seal it up. i build a number of cells with an egg and spiders in each, but i am not a jug builder. i have no time to fool after such silly affairs as you sometimes see on twigs and bushes.”
“she isn’t artistic enough, she had better say,” remarked the little jug builder. “my nests are wonderfully pretty. i have heard many people say so. i am very careful to give them a delicate shape. i line them with silk too, but i will not tell you how i make this silk. even the wise men have not discovered our secret.”
“disagreeable creature!” remarked mrs. horntail; “but then what can you expect from a wasp of any kind? now who is making that dreadful noise? i shall certainly be a wreck before i get away from this place. people who buzz in such a fashion ought certainly to be turned out. but there, what’s the use of asking? i might know it could only be——”
“sir bumble bee at your service.” and a big fellow dressed all in black and gold buzzed up before the angry mrs. horntail.
