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

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"Confit cito

Quam si tu objicias formicis papaverem."

"It vanished in a twinkling,

Just like poppy seed thrown to the ants."

ssss1 Trinummus, Act ii. sc. 4, l. 7.

Any one who has seen the eagerness with which certain southern ants seize upon seeds thrown in their path will appreciate the correctness of this simile.

Claudius Ælianus, who lived in the time of Hadrian, gives a detailed account of the habits which he attributes to ants,ssss1 from which the following is a translation: "In summer time, after harvest, while the ears are being threshed the ants pry about in troops around the threshing floors, leaving their homes, and going singly, in pairs, or sometimes three together. They then select grains of wheat or barley, and go straight home by the way they came. Some go to collect, others to carry away the burden, and they avoid the way for one another with great politeness and consideration, especially the unburdened for the weight carriers. Now these excellent creatures, when they have returned home, and stored their granaries with wheat and barley, bore through each grain of seed in the middle; that which falls off in the process becomes a meal for the ants, and the remainder is unfertile. This these worthy housekeepers do, lest when the rains come the seeds should sprout, as they would do if left entire, and thus the ants should come to want. So we see that the ants have good share in the gifts of nature, in this respect as well as others." Further onssss1 he gives a very interesting account of their mode of collecting and preparing the grain, many details of which I can myself substantiate from personal observation, though I have never seen ants actually at work upon the ears of corn. "But when the ants start a foraging, they follow the biggest, who take the lead as generals. And when they come to the crops, the younger ones stand under the stalk, but the leaders ascending gnaw through the culms, as they are called [ὀυραγοὑς, 'the stalk ends on which the ears grow' (Lid. and Scott, Gr. Lex.)], probably meaning that they detach the separate spikelets of which the ears are composed], of the ears [καρπἱμων], which they throw to the people below. These busy themselves with cutting away the chaff and peeling off the envelopes which contain and cover the grain. So the ants, though they need no threshing time, nor men to winnow for them, nor an artificial draught of wind to separate corn and chaff, yet have the food of men who both plough and sow for it." Ælian appears also to have heard reports of the habits of ants in tropical countries, for he says,ssss1 "Certainly the Indian ant is also a wise creature.... They leave one opening at the top (of the nest), by which they have their exits and entrances, when they come bearing the seeds which they collect." I have never myself found seeds bored through the centre in the way recorded above, but it is possible that different species of ants may treat the seeds in other ways than those observed by me; or, on the other hand, Ælian may have mistaken the gnawing off the radicle of the seed, a process which I shall describe from personal observation below, and imagined that the seed itself was pierced.