HONEY ANTS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXVI, Issue 8034, 6 December 1886, Page 3

HONEY ANTS .

(San Francisco Call.) The honey ant is a small red insect, extremely demonstrative and active, and found particularly in Texas, and Mexico, and in considerable numbers in Colorado. Their nests are prominent mounds in some cases, and again are low heaps, spread over an area of twenty or thirty square feet, forming a community. As a rule, they are nocturnal, working at night, though I have seen them at work in the bright sunlight at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and marching in a line, perhaps seven feet wide and forty feet in length, to a cotton wood tree, up which they passed—long and slender—coming down larger and full of a pure white liquid. It would strike even a casual observer as curious that these ants were carrying home a liquid that could hardly be stored away, ants not having, as a rule, storehouses for liquid provisions; but the honey ant over-' comes this difficulty in a decidedly novel manner. Certain of the ants, either by agreement or selection, are utilised as receptacles for the honey-food supply, and become literally honey bottles. They are kept by the others in a separate apartment, about six inches long by four in height, that is a store room. Here, if the nest is carefully opened, the ants or honey bottles will be seen hanging on the wall, looking like ripe currants. The modus operandi that results in this is as follows : The ants, at least the small ones, forage for food, and find it in some cases in what are known as galls, curious enlargements or growths, often seen on trees and formed by the egg of an insect having been deposited in the wood, the latter growing about it and allowing in some cases an escape of a liquid that is greatly esteemed by ants, and certainly tastes like honey. ' Pilling their bodies with this material, the workers proceed to the store-room where the bottle ants are kept and deliver it up to them, the receptacles receiving so much that they become distended to an enormous extent, as we have seen, and are incapable of movement to any great degree. Their bodies upon examination seem particularly adapted for the purpose, being covered in their normal condition by several plates that spread apart when the abdomen is distended. How long these living bottles hold their store is not known—undoubtedly indefinitely. When the other ants wish to draw their rations they proceed to the dark chamber, and a supply is forthwith given up. Such an arrangement seems to show that ants have much more intelligence than they are given credit for, as all their movements cannot be considered instinctive. In Colorado their nests are quite common about the Garden of the gods, and the tunnels that they form often penetrate considerable distances into the rock, and the work in arriving at the chamber where - the honey bottles are hung is one of no little labour.