INTERESTING KINGDOMS WHERE THERE ARE NO SHIRKERS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7, 14 August 1912, Page 58

INTERESTING KINGDOMS WHERE THERE ARE NO SHIRKERS.

JT is difficult to realise, when you look at an ant-hill, what a marvellous ’ creation that little mound realty is. It is, in its way, far more wonderful than Buckingham Palace. Perhaps the Tower of London js the nearest human approach to it palace and fortress and town combiner!. Just as monarch and nobles and subjects used, at one time, to dwell in the Tower, so tlie ant hill has its grades of society —queen, aristocrats, soldiers, and workers. It is only by drawing the ant hill ae if it were a human habitation —as we have done above—that you ean realise the wonders it contains. On top you see the door, which is always jealously guarded by a soldierant, posted on sentry-go. Next you see the guardroom. Floor 2, counting downwards, is the summer sleeping-room for the workers. In the third floor the workers live and dine. No. 4 is the storage room, while the fifth floor provides the barracks for the ants’ standing army. They form the guard for the queen, who lives and lays her eggs on the floor iijloiv. Next —floor 7 —come the storage

rooms of fodder and grain for the milchcows—the aphids, who suck up "milk” from blades of grass with their feet, so that the ant milkmaids can afterwards “milk” them by stroking their legs until a drop of “milk” falls. Other little insects collect honey, ami are "milked” in' the same way. The stables, where they are kept, are shown on floor 8. Then, below the earth, we come to the ninth floor, the nurseries, where the milk and honey which the milkmaids have secured is handed over io the nurserymaid ants, to be given to the baby ants, just hatched, as larvae, from eggs. Below —floors If) and 11 —are other nurseries, where the baby ants are cared for in various stages of their growth. Next we find the winter quarters of the ant kingdom, and on the same door is the graveyard; for, like the Tower of Txmdon in the old days, the ants’ palace is complete even to a cemetery. Last of all we come to the queen’s winter apartment. Their wonderful buildings—- far more marvellous, in comparison, than the Pyramids of Egypt—only form one of the wonderful features of the ant kingdom. The ants have a stern system of justice, by which shirkers are driven forth or executed by the strong jaws of one of the soldiers.