As The Leaders Toss Them
On One Side, The Rank And File Seize Them And Carry Them Off.
One morning I saw a party going forth on what has been supposed
to be a slave-hunting expedition.
They came to a stick, which, being inclosed
in a white-ant gallery, I knew contained numbers of this insect;
but I was surprised to see the black soldiers passing without touching it.
I lifted up the stick and broke a portion of the gallery,
and then laid it across the path in the middle of the black regiment.
The white ants, when uncovered, scampered about with great celerity,
hiding themselves under the leaves, but attracted little attention
from the black marauders till one of the leaders caught them,
and, applying his sting, laid them in an instant on one side
in a state of coma; the others then promptly seized them and rushed off.
On first observing these marauding insects at Kolobeng, I had the idea,
imbibed from a work of no less authority than Brougham's Paley,
that they seized the white ants in order to make them slaves;
but, having rescued a number of captives, I placed them aside,
and found that they never recovered from the state of insensibility
into which they had been thrown by the leaders. I supposed then
that the insensibility had been caused by the soldiers
holding the necks of the white ants too tightly with their mandibles,
as that is the way they seize them; but even the pupae which I took
from the soldier-ants, though placed in a favorable temperature,
never became developed. In addition to this, if any one examines
the orifice by which the black ant enters his barracks,
he will always find a little heap of hard heads and legs of white ants,
showing that these black ruffians are a grade lower than slave-stealers,
being actually cannibals. Elsewhere I have seen a body of them
removing their eggs from a place in which they were likely
to be flooded by the rains; I calculated their numbers to be 1260;
they carried their eggs a certain distance, then laid them down,
when others took them and carried them farther on. Every ant in the colony
seemed to be employed in this laborious occupation, yet there was not
a white slave-ant among them. One cold morning I observed
a band of another species of black ant returning each with a captive;
there could be no doubt of their cannibal propensities,
for the "brutal soldiery" had already deprived the white ants of their legs.
The fluid in the stings of this species is of an intensely acid taste.
I had often noticed the stupefaction produced by the injection of a fluid
from the sting of certain insects before. It is particularly observable
in a hymenopterous insect called the "plasterer" (`Pelopaeus Eckloni'),
which in his habits resembles somewhat the mason-bee. It is about
an inch and a quarter in length, jet black in color, and may be observed
coming into houses, carrying in its fore legs a pellet of soft plaster
about the size of a pea.
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