Insect Adventures. Fabre Jean-Henri
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Название: Insect Adventures
Автор: Fabre Jean-Henri
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664635211
isbn:
Next morning:
“Puss! Puss!”
Not a sign of him! We hunt, we call. Nothing. Oh, the hypocrite, the hypocrite! How he has tricked us! He has gone, he is at our old home. So I declare, but the family will not believe it.
My two daughters went back to the old home. They found the Cat, as I said they would, and brought him back in a hamper. His paws and belly were covered with red clay; and yet the weather was dry, there was no mud. The Cat, therefore, must have swum the river, and the moist fur had kept the red earth of the fields through which he had passed. The distance between our two homes was four and a half miles.
We kept the deserter in our attic for two weeks, and then we let him out again. Before twenty-four hours had passed he was back at his old home. We had to leave him to his fate. A neighbor out that way told me that he saw him one day hiding behind a hedge with a rabbit in his mouth. He was no longer provided with food; he had to hunt for it as best he could. I heard no more of him. He came to a bad end, no doubt; he had become a robber and must have met with a robber’s fate.
These true stories prove that Cats have in their fashion the instinct of my Mason-bees. So, too, have Pigeons, who, transported for hundreds of miles, are able to find their way back to their own dove-cot; so have the Swallows and many other birds. But to go back to the insects. I wished to find out if Ants, who are insects closely related to the Bees, have the same sense of direction that they have.
THE RED ANTS
Among the treasures of my piece of waste ground is an ant-hill belonging to the celebrated Red Ants, the slave-hunting Amazons. If you have never heard about these Ants, their practices seem almost too wonderful to believe. They are unable to bring up their own families, to look for their food, to take it even when it is within their reach. Therefore they need servants to feed them and keep house for them. They make a practice of stealing children to wait on the community. They raid the neighboring ant-hills, the home of a different species; they carry away the Ant-babies, who are in the nymph or swaddling-clothes stage, that is, wrapped in the cocoons. These grow up in the Red Ants’ house and become willing and industrious servants.
When the hot weather of June and July sets in, I often see the Amazons leave their barracks of an afternoon and start on an expedition. The column is five or six yards long. At the first suspicion of an ant-hill, the front ones halt and spread out in a swarming throng, which is increased by the others as they come up hurriedly. Scouts are sent out; the Amazons recognize that they are on a wrong track; and the column forms again. It resumes its march, crosses the garden paths, disappears from sight in the grass, reappears farther on, threads its way through the heap of dead leaves, comes out again and continues its search.
At last, a nest of Black Ants is discovered. The Red Ants hasten down to the dormitories, enter the burrows where the Ant-grubs lie and soon come out with their booty. Then we have, at the gates of the underground city, a bewildering scrimmage between the defending Blacks and the attacking Reds. The struggle is too unequal to remain in doubt. Victory falls to the Reds, who race back home, each with her prize, a swaddled baby, dangling from her jaws.
I should like to go on with the story of the Amazons, but I have no time at present. Their return to the nest is what I am interested in. Do they know their way as the Bees do?
Apparently not; for I find that the Ants always take exactly the same path home that they did coming, no matter how difficult it was or how many short cuts might be taken. I came upon them one day when they were advancing on a raid by the side of a garden pond. The wind was blowing hard and blew whole rows of the Ants into the water, where the Fish gobbled them up. I thought that on the way back they would avoid this dangerous bit. Not at all: they came back the same way, and the Fish received a double windfall, the Ants and their prizes.
As I had not time to watch the Ants for whole afternoons, I asked my granddaughter Lucie, a little rogue who likes to hear my stories of the Ants, to help me. She had been present at the great battle between the Reds and the Blacks and was much impressed by the stealing of the long-clothes babies, and she was willing to wander about the garden when the weather was fine, keeping an eye on the Red Ants for me.
One day, while I was working in my study, there came a banging at my door.
“It’s I, Lucie! Come quick: the Reds have gone into the Blacks’ house. Come quick!”
“And do you know the road they took?”
“Yes, I marked it.”
“What! Marked it? And how?”
“I did what Hop-o’-My-Thumb did: I scattered little white stones along the road.”
I hurried out. Things had happened as my six-year-old helper had said. The Ants had made their raid and were returning along the track of telltale pebbles. When I took some of them up on a leaf and set them a few feet away from the path, they were lost. The Ant relies on her sight and her memory for places to guide her home. Even when her raids to the same ant-hill are two or three days apart, she follows exactly the same path each time. The memory of an Ant! What can that be? Is it like ours? I do not know; but I do know that, though closely related to the Bee, she has not the same sense of direction that the Bee possesses.
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