Читать книгу Harvesting Ants and Trap-Door Spiders. Notes and Observations on Their Habits and Dwellings онлайн

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I am inclined to think that the ants took these seeds believing them to be larvæ of other ants which they might eat; for fresh seeds of violet are not very unlike the larvæ of certain ants, as, for example, those of Atta barbara, figured at Plate I., Fig. E., p. 21, the semi-transparent membranous appendage partly concealing the seed and giving it a fleshy appearance.

I think this the more likely because on two occasions the seeds which had been carried into the nest were subsequently thrown out by the ants, which had I believe discovered their mistake.

However, just as the ancient writers, judging from their own experience and from the reports of others, had erred in attributing to ants in general the habit of seed-storing possessed by certain species commonly found in the south, so have modern naturalists fallen into the mistake of denying it to any of the European species.

The older authors who lived in Greece and Italy, and the mediæval authors who drew their information in great measure from the former, being familiar with the fact that some ants habitually collect large supplies of seed, went so far as to assert, or to imply, that all European ants do so; the authors of the present day, on the other hand, generalizing too freely from their experience of ants found near their northern homes, maintained and maintain the very reverse.