Part 17

It was a battle, a great battle. On the one hand, a struggle by brutal invaders intent on sacking the home and pillaging the stores of a community given to ways of peace and just now reduced in numbers by a migration or exodus from home of a large group of restless spirits; on the other hand, a struggle for home and property and the lives of hundreds of babies by this weak and presumably timid and unwarlike people. A great band of Germans were at the door of Fuzzy's house trying to get in! They buzzed and pushed and ran their stings in and out of their bodies, and crowded the entryway full. But the Italian workers and guards had roused their community, and pouring out from the hive into the narrow entry was a stream of angry and brave amber bees, ready to fight to the death for their home.

It was really a terrific struggle. The Italians, few in numbers as a community, were yet enough to oppose on fairly equal terms the band of Germans, for by no means all the Germans had come from their house. And the Italians had the great advantage of being defenders. They had only to keep out the black column trying to force its way in through the narrow door and entry. And they were no laggards in battle. They fought with perfect courage and great energy. Often a small group of Italians would force its way out of the door and into the very midst of the Germans outside on the window-sill. These brave bees were all killed, overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the enemy. But not until they had left many dying Germans on the stone window-ledge were their own paralyzed and dying bodies hustled out of the way.

In many cases the combat took on the character of duels between single pairs of combatants. A German and an Italian would clasp each other with jaws and legs, and thus interlocked and whirling over and over with violent beating of their wings would stab at each other until one or both were mortally wounded. All the time the frenzied ball would be rolling nearer and nearer the outer edge of the treacherous sloping window-ledge, until finally over it would go, whirling in the air through the thirty feet of fall to the ground below. Here the struggle would go on, if the fighters were not too stunned by the fall, until one or both bees were dead or paralyzed.

It is really too painful to tell of this fight. And it was painful to watch. But the end came soon. And it was a glorious victory for Fuzzy and her companions. The German robbers flew back, what were left of them, to their own hive. Mary and I tried all through the fight to watch Fuzzy. But we saw her only once; she was in the entry then and nearly in the front row of fighters. We were glad to see her so brave, but fearful for her fate. After the fight we looked anxiously through the hive for our little white-spotted friend. We didn't see her, and were ready to mourn her for lost, when Mary happened to look out on the window-ledge where a few Italians were pushing the remaining paralyzed or dead Germans off. There was Fuzzy dragging, with much effort, a dead, black bee along the rough stone.

We were very happy, then, and wanted more than ever to be able to talk to our brave little champion and rejoice with her over the splendid victory. But we could only do as Fuzzy seemed to be doing. That is, take up again the work that lay at our hands. My work was to go into the lecture-room and talk to a class about the absence of intelligence and mind and spirit in the lower animals and the dependence of their behavior upon physics and chemistry and mechanics! Mary's work was to go out into the poppy-field and talk with the little grass people whom she never sees or hears, but knows are there.

ANIMATED HONEY-JARS

It was one evening not long after our afternoon on Bungalow Hill, where Mary had found the mealy-bugs in the runways of an ant's nest under a stone, and I had told her about the clever little brown ants and their aphid cattle in the Illinois corn-fields. Ever since that afternoon Mary had been asking questions about ants, and so this evening I was translating bits to her from a new German book about ants. It told about the cruel forays of the hordes of the great fighting and robbing Ecitons of the Amazons; of the extraordinary mutually helpful relations between the Aztec ants and the Imbauba tree of South America, which result in the ants getting a comfortable home and special food from the tree, while the tree gets protection through the Aztecs from the leaf-stealing Ecodomas. It told of the ants that live in the hollow leaves of the Dischidia plants in the Philippine Islands, and the way the plants get even by sending slender aerial rootlets into the leaves to feed on the dead bodies of the ants that die in the nests. It told of the ants in this country that build sheds of wood-pulp over colonies of honey-dew insects or ant-cattle on the stems of plants; of the fungus-garden ants of South America and Mexico and Texas that bite off little pieces of green leaves and make beds of them in special chambers in their underground nests, so that certain moulds grow on these leaf-beds and provide a special kind of food for the ant-gardeners. It told of the ants that make slaves of other ants, and get to depend so much on these slaves that they can't even care for their own children, and it told about the honey-ants of the Garden of the Gods that make some of the workers in each nest--but that's what this story is going to tell about, so we had better wait.

But it was all a veritable fairy-story book, as any good book about the ways and life of ants must be. And Mary listened eagerly. She liked it. When going-home time came she had, however, one insistent question to ask. "What can I see?" she demanded. "What can I see right away; to-morrow?"

"Mary you can--see--to-morrow,"--and I think rapidly,--"you can see--to-morrow,"--still thinking,--"ah, yes--yes you can; you can see them to-morrow."

"But what can I see to-morrow?"

"Why the animated honey-jars; didn't I say what? No? Well, to-morrow we can go to see them; in the Arboretum at the foot of the big Monterey pine. I think I remember the exact place."

"But I thought the honey-ants were only in Mexico and New Mexico and Colorado," says Mary. "Didn't the book say that?"

"Yes, that kind; but we have a kind of our own here in California. The sort that McCook found in the Garden of the Gods and studied all that summer twenty-five years ago is found only there and in the Southwest, but there are two or three other kinds of honey-ants known, and one of them that has never been told about in the books at all is right here on the campus. There are several of the nests here, or were a few years ago, and we'll go to-morrow and try to find one. It will be fine, won't it?"

"Fine," said Mary. "Good-night."

And so the next morning we went. The Arboretum is a place where once were planted almost all the kinds of trees that grow wild in California, besides many other kinds from Australia and Japan and New Zealand and Peru and Chili and several of the other Pacific Ocean countries. But the big, swift-growing eucalyptuses and Monterey pines have crowded out many of the other more tender and less-pushing kinds. However, it is still a wonderful place of trees. Many birds live there; swift troops of the beautiful plumed California quails; crimson-throated Anna humming-birds, crestless California jays, fidgeting finches and juncos, spunky sparrows and wrens, chattering chickadees and titmice, fierce little fly-catchers and kinglets. There are winding paths and little-used roads in it, and altogether it is a fine place to go when one has only a short hour for walking and seeing things.

And so Mary and I came with a garden-trowel and a glass fruit-jar to the foot of the big Monterey pine near the toyon. A toyon, if you are an Easterner and need telling, is the tree that bears the red berries for Christmas for us Pacific-Coasters. It is our holly, as the Ceanothus is our lilac, and the poison-oak is our autumn-red sumac.

At the foot of the Monterey pine we began our search for the honey-ants. We didn't, of course, expect to find them walking about with their swollen bodies full of amber honey, for the honey-bearers are supposed not to walk around, but to stay inside the nest, in a special chamber made for them. We looked rather for the honey-gatherers, the worker foragers.

Pretty soon Mary found a swift little black ant. But, no, it was an Aphaenogaster that--

"A feeno-gasser?" asks Mary. "What is that?"

"That has the curious, flat-bodied dwarf crickets living with it in its nests," I continue. "Myrmecophila, the ant-lover, they call this little cricket which has lost its wings and its voice and is altogether an insignificant and meek little guest unbidden but tolerated at the ant's table. And here, here is a big black-and-brown carpenter-ant going home with a seed in its mouth."

"Where is its home? Does it build a house out of wood? Let's follow it," Mary bursts in.

"No, we are after honey-ants, remember. We mustn't let ourselves get distracted by all these others. The carpenter-ants do make themselves a home of wood, but they do it by gnawing out galleries and chambers in a dead tree trunk or stump or in a neglected timber. That isn't exactly building, but it is at least a kind of carpentering, a sort of--"

"Is this one?" interrupts Mary, poking violently at an angry red-headed little slave-maker ant that seemed anxious to get off to its home where its slaves, which are other ants captured when still young and unacquainted with their rightful family, do all the work of food-getting and cleaning and taking care of the babies.

And then I recognized a Prenolepis, that is,--and I do beg pardon,--one of our campus honey-ants. Of course I suppose they are elsewhere in California and perhaps north in Oregon and east in Nevada and Arizona, but I have only seen them here, and hence always think of them as belonging exclusively with us campus-dwellers. It was a little brown ant with black hind body and paler under side. It isn't particularly impressive, for it is only about one-eighth of an inch long, and its colors and appearance are much like those of many other ants, but there is something about it sufficiently distinctive to let one recognize it at sight.

The thing to do now, of course, was to find its nest. There are various ways of finding the nest of any particular ant you may happen to discover running about loose over the country, but not one of them am I going to tell you. They are good things to work out for yourself. Mary and I know how, and so we had little trouble and didn't have to spend much time in finding the home of our wandering Prenolepis,--there it is again,--campus honey-ant I mean. And that is a fair name for it, for McCook who found the famous honey-ants of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado named his kind Myrmecocystus melliger hortusdeorum, which is straight Latin and Greek for the "honey-pot ant of the Garden of the Gods." But what a name for a little ant one-eighth of an inch long to carry!

It would take too many words and I am afraid would be too trivial a story for even this very happy-go-lucky little book to tell how Mary and I dug and dug in the ground near the foot of the tree, and how carefully we worked with our garden-trowel and mostly with our fingers! And how we traced out runway after runway and opened chamber after chamber of the honey-ant's nest until we found the honey-pantry with its strange jars of sweetness all hanging from the roof. The picture that Mary carefully sketched in, and that Sekko Shimada painted for us with his dainty Japanese brushes and little saucers of costly Japanese ink, shows very well part of the nest, that part that had one of the honey-rooms in. You won't see the base of the Monterey pine-tree in the picture, nor any of the other trees that were all around, because Mary didn't put them into her sketch, and we forgot to tell Sekko where the nest was. But the galleries and honey-chamber and the ants themselves are all right in Sekko's picture.

In some of the galleries we had found ants with considerably swollen hind bodies, which evidently had the stomach or crop well filled with some nearly transparent, pale yellowish-brown liquid. But it was not until we discovered the honey-pantry that we saw the extraordinary fully laden real live honey-jars, which were, of course, nothing but some of the worker ants hanging by their feet from the roof of the chamber, with their hind bodies enormously swollen by the great quantity of honey held in the crop. In opening the chamber we dislodged two or three of the honey-jars that fell to the floor and could hardly turn over or walk at all, so helpless were they. And one of them broke and the honey came out in a big drop, and I tasted it on the tip of my little finger, and it was sweet. So it was surely honey. And you should have seen how eagerly two or three other workers in the chamber, without swollen bodies, lapped up this sweet drop that came out of the body of the poor, broken honey-jar!

As we had broken into the home of the honey-ants and had pretty nearly wrecked it, it seemed only fair that we should try to help our honey-ants begin another home under as kindly conditions as possible. So we put as many of them as we could find, foraging workers, honey-holders, and the queen whom we found in a special queen room, into our glass fruit-jar with some soil, and brought them all home and put them into a formicary. Which is simply an artificial ants' nest, or house already arranged for ants to live in. It has a place to hold food and has dark rooms and sunny rooms, cool rooms and warm ones, all nicely fixed with runways connecting them, and food is put in as often as necessary and always in one place, which the ants learn to know very soon, indeed. This makes housekeeping easy and pleasant for the ants, and lets us see a great deal of how it is carried on, because there are glass sides and top to the house, so that by lifting little pieces of black cardboard or cloth we can look in and watch the ants at work.