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Adventures of a Grain of Dust

<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2> (JUNE) <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> Go to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways, and be wise. —Proverbs 6:6. </div> </div> <h3>THE LITTLE FARMERS WITH SIX FEET</h3> I don't believe I've ever heard anybody say anything against an angleworm; although not many people, even to this day, I'll be bound, realize what a useful citizen the angleworm is. But now we come to a class of farmers that, as a class,[Pg 93] are positively disliked; farmers that nobody has a good word for, that nobody wants for neighbors. The charge against them is that, like the man in the Bible, they are always reaping where they have not sown; always helping themselves to other people's crops—bushels of wheat, bushels of rye, tons of cotton, loads of hay and apples and peaches and plums; and nice garden vegetables; and even the trees in the wood lot. It is estimated, for instance, that the chinch-bug helps himself every year to $30,000,000 worth of Uncle Sam's grain; while other insects make away with 10 per cent of his hay crop, 20 per cent of mother's garden vegetables, $10,000,000 worth of father's tobacco; and the Hessian fly sees to it that between 10 and 25 per cent of the farmer's wheat never gets to mill. "Yes, and sometimes it's 50-50 between the farmer and the fly," said the high school boy, who often spends his vacation with a country cousin. Then there are insects that injure and destroy forest trees because they like to eat the leaves or the wood itself; and some 300 kinds of insects that make themselves free with other people's orchards. <h4>I. Considering the Ant</h4> But, as I said a few moments ago, it takes all sorts of people to make a world; and as there are good and bad citizens among men, so there are good and bad among insects. Indeed there are so many useful insects that help make or fertilize the soil by grinding up earth and burying things in it, that even this chapter, which is rather long, as you see, can't begin to tell about all of them. So suppose[Pg 94] we give our space to a few by way of example, and then look up others in other books in the library. <h5>AMOUNT OF WORK DONE BY ANTS</h5> First of all let us consider the ways of the ant (as the Bible tells us to). The ant's work may be said to take up where the earthworm leaves off. Mr. Earthworm, as we have seen, is a little fastidious about the kind of land he tills. Among other things, he is inclined to avoid sandy soil, while the ants will be found piling up their pretty cones of sand or clay as well as of black earth. And in some soils the ants do more important work than the worm that helped make Mr. Darwin famous. In the course of a single year they may bring fresh soil to the surface to the average depth of a quarter of an inch over many square miles. This not only helps to keep the farmer's fields fertile by adding fresh, unused earth, but enriches them by burying the vegetation—such as leaves and twigs and[Pg 95] branches broken from dead trees by storms—so that it decays. This burying of vegetation is the very thing the good farmer does when he spreads his fields with manure from the barnyard, or when he ploughs under the stubble. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i106.jpg" alt="" /> A HEAP OF GRIST FROM AN ANT SOIL MILL Something of an ant-hill, isn't it? It is a foot high and measures nearly three feet across. You will find such ant hills in the Arkansas Valley in Colorado, where the photograph of this one was taken. </div> </div> Ants are very glad to do this for the farmer because it isn't any extra trouble for them. Their little heaps of fresh earth are thrown out in connection with the building of their homes. The mining ants dig galleries in clay, building pillars to support the work and covering them with thatches of grass. The red and yellow field ants are the masons. They first raise pillars and then construct arches between them, covering these arches with the loose piles[Pg 96] of soil which we know as ant-hills. The carpenter-ants bore their cells in the dead limbs of trees, and the wood dust they make from them hurries on the process of returning these dead limbs to the soil. One kind of carpenter-ant covers its walls with a mixture of sawdust, earth, and spiders' webs. An ant in Australia builds its home of leaves fastened together with a kind of saliva. One kind of ant, whose calling card among scientific people is Formica fusca,[12] adds new stories to old houses as the colony grows; much as in the growth of cities and hamlets the buildings grow taller with the growth of the town. Just as men do, such ants first build the side walls and then the ceilings. As if these ants are working under contract and must get their job done by a certain time, two groups are employed on the ceiling at the same time, each group working toward the other from the opposite wall and meeting in the middle. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i107.jpg" alt="" /> THE DESERTED VILLAGE UNDER THE STONE If Oliver Goldsmith had been as much interested in ants as was the French "Homer of the insect," Henri Fabre, he might have written of another kind of "Deserted Village," its "desert walks" and its "mouldering walls." This is a deserted village of ants. The little citizens that built it lived under a stone. When the stone was lifted it took the entire roof off the place. </div> </div> <h5>THE ANT WHO DIDN'T KNOW HIS TRADE</h5> As you may suppose, this is real architectural engineering and no place for amateurs. I once saw a foolish worker starting a roof from the top of one of the side walls without paying any attention to the fact that the other wall was much higher. The result was he struck the middle of it, instead of joining it at the top. Another ant passing, possibly the supervising architect, saw what was going to happen. So what does he do but stop and tear down the[Pg 97] other's work and build the ceiling over again! "There! That's the way to put in a ceiling," he seemed to say. "For goodness sake, where did you learn your trade?" Huber, the famous student of ants, saw two of these wonderful insects do the very same thing. Sometimes the situation is such that it is necessary to build a very wide ceiling, so wide that it would fall of its own weight unless supported in some way. Then what would you do; that is, if you were an ant? "Why, I'd put up pillars to hold it." That's exactly what the ants do; they put up pillars; but instead of using steel beams, as men do in this day of steel, the ant architects make pillars of clay—build them up with pellets, little clay bricks which they shape with their mandibles—their jaws. But the ants seem to have some of the methods of steel construction, too; the use of girders and things. Ebrard, a French student of ants, tells how, when a certain roof threatened to fall, some Sir Christopher Wren of the ant world used a blade of grass as a girder, just as Sir Christopher in his day put in girders to support the roof of Saint Paul's Cathedral, and as men use steel girders to-day. The ant fastened a little mass of earth on the end of a grass stalk growing near to bend it over; then gnawed it a little at the bottom to make it bend still more, and finally fixed it with mud pellets into the roof. But here's something that will make you smile! You have heard about the lazy man down in Arkansas with the hole in his roof? You remember he never mended it in dry weather because it didn't need it, and when it rained[Pg 98] he couldn't mend it on account of the rain! <h5>RAINY-DAY WORK IN THE ANT WORLD</h5> Well, these Formica fusca folks are as different from that Arkansas man as anything you could imagine. First of all, being ants, they are anything but lazy; secondly, they never put off needed work on their roofs on account of rain. In fact, they choose the first wet day to do it. As soon as the rain begins they build up a thick terrace on the roof of the old dwelling, carrying in their jaws little piles of finely ground earth which they spread out with their hind legs. Then, by hollowing out this roof, they turn it into a new story. Last of all they put on the ceiling. You see the rain helps them in mixing their clay. There are ants that build up vaulted viaducts or covered ways, and they use clay for that.[13] They make the clay by[Pg 99] mixing earth with saliva. Some of these viaducts reach out from the house—the ants' house—to their "cow" pasture. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i110.jpg" alt="" /> AN ANT CARRYING ONE OF HER COWS </div> </div> You know about how ants keep cows, little bugs called aphids? The aphids feed on plants, and the clay viaducts protect the ants from their enemies and from the sun in going to and from the pasture; for this particular family of ants doesn't like the sun. They make clay sheds for their cattle, too. Here and there along the clay viaduct are large roomy spaces, cow-sheds, so to speak—where the little honey cows gather when they aren't feeding. Another kind of ant builds earth huts around its cow pastures. The large red ants (F. rufa), sometimes called "horse ants," build hills as large as small haycocks. <h4>II. The Termites and their Towers of Babel</h4> But speaking of big buildings, did you ever hear of a skyscraper a mile high? Well the home of the six-footed farmer I am going to tell you about now is as much taller than he is as a mile-high skyscraper would be taller than a man. The remarkable little creatures that build these skyscrapers are called "termites." Termites are also known as "white ants." This seems funny when we know that they are neither "ants" nor are they white. The young of the workers are white, to be sure, but the grown-ups are of various colors, and never milky white as they are when young. The termites were first called "white ants" in books of travel because the termites the travellers saw were the young people. [Pg 100] <h5>HOW TERMITES ARE LIKE THE ANTS</h5> The termites are really closer relatives of dragon-flies, cockroaches, and crickets than of the ants, but they do look a great deal like an ant, and they have many of the ways of the ants. As in the case of ants, all the members of one community are the children of one queen. The king lives with the queen in a private apartment. Sometimes—as with human royalties—the king and queen will have separate residences, but the termite royalties always live in the same house with their people; they are very democratic. Some kinds of termites live in rotten trees, which they tunnel into, and that is their contribution to soil-making; while others build great, big solid houses of earth and fibres, mixed. These houses are called "termitariums," and are six, eight, ten, even twenty-five feet high; fully 1,000 times the length of the worker. Think of a man five feet high, and then multiply by 1,000, and you see you have got nearly a mile! <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i113.jpg" alt="" /> SKYSCRAPERS A MILE HIGH "Some kinds of termites build great, solid houses of earth and fibres mixed. These houses are six, eight, ten, even twenty-five feet high, fully one thousand times the length of the worker. Think of a man five feet high and then multiply by one thousand, and you see you have got nearly a mile." </div> </div> These termite skyscrapers aren't much to look at on the outside, but inside they're just fine; they have everything the most particular ant could want. For instance, the termites are right up-to-date in their ideas about fresh air, their houses being well ventilated through windows left in the walls for that purpose. You can see the importance of this fresh-air system when you know there are thousands of termites under the same roof. They also have a sewage system for carrying off the water of the rains. And a fine piece of mechanical engineering the building of it is, too; for these "water-pipes" are the underground passages hollowed out in getting the clay to build the homes. The termites build their homes with one hand and dig the sewer[Pg 101] with the other, so to speak. <h5>THE THERMOSTATS FOR THE NURSERIES</h5> The termitarium has as many rooms in it as a big hotel—oh, I don't know how many—and they are all built around the chambers of the king and queen. Next to the royal apartments are the pantries, a lot of them, and they[Pg 102] are all stored with food. In the upper part of the termitarium are the nurseries—many nurseries—for no one nursery could care for any such numbers of babies as the queen has. Between the nursery and the roof is an air-space, and there are also air-spaces on the sides and beneath. The nursery thus being surrounded by air, the eggs and, when they come along, the babies are protected from changes of temperature. It's the same principle that's employed in making refrigerators and thermos bottles. The rooms in which the eggs are kept are divided by walls made of fragments of wood and gum glued together. This mixture is a bad conductor[14] of heat or cold. And so the eggs are kept at an even temperature. While we cannot see any of the termite skyscrapers in the United States, because we have none of the species of termites that build them, we can see a member of the termite family. This is the common white ant that digs into joists of houses. On the outside of these same joists, and up in the attics of old farmhouses, if there happens to be a broken window-pane, or some other hole through which she can get in, you can see the nest of another tiller of the soil, the wasp. The mason-wasps or mud daubers are the most common. You will find their nests on the rafters of the barn when you go to throw down hay, or when you go into the corn-crib. They have all sorts of fancies—these wasps—about their clay homes and where to build them. Some build on the walls and some in the corners of rafters, others prefer outdoor life. Some want to live alone, others like society. What are known as[Pg 103] "social" wasps sometimes build their nests in tiny hollows that they dig in the ground; others fasten their nests to the boughs of trees. The work of these wasps, from the farming standpoint, is useful not alone in grinding the soil, but helping to supply it with humus; for their nests are made of wood fibre, which they tear with their mandibles from gateposts, rail fences, and the bark of trees. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i115.jpg" alt="" /> NESTS OF MASON-WASPS </div> </div> The carpenter-wasp is both a wood-worker and a clay-worker. He cuts tubular nests in wood and divides them by partitions. We think we're pretty smart, we humans, because we are always picking up ideas, but here's a creature, no bigger than the end of your finger, who has picked up an idea from the carpenter-bee, grafted it on his[Pg 104] native trade of clay-worker, and made himself as nice and cosey a country place as you'd want to see! <h5>ABOUT THE WASP, THE FOX, AND THE BUMBLEBEE</h5> Here's another example of the same thing, this spreading of good ideas among the neighbors. It's about the fox, the digger-wasps, and the bumblebee. The fox can dig his own burrow when he has to, but if he finds somebody else's that he can use, he just helps himself—provided, of course, the owner isn't Brer Bear, or some other big fellow that Brer Fox doesn't care to have any words with. In the same way the digger-wasps make their own little burrows if they are obliged to, but prefer to help themselves to ones they find already made, although they don't drive anybody else out. They simply take possession of holes left by field-mice. The bumblebee does the same thing. The bumblebee digs a hole a foot or more deep, carpets it with leaves, and lines it with wax. Leading up to the home is a long, winding tunnel. As Bumblebeeville grows bigger there may be two or three hundred bees in one nest. As the bumblebee babies keep coming and coming, the burrow has to be dug bigger and bigger, to take care of them. <h4>III. The House that Mrs. Mason Built</h4> But the greatest of bee workers in the soil is the mason-bee. You can get an idea of what a useful citizen the mason-bee is when I tell you that one of the little villages of one species sometimes contains enough clay to make a good load for a team of oxen. Yet for all that, they might have gone on with their work for years and years to come—just[Pg 105] as they have for ages in the past—and people wouldn't have thought much about it, if it hadn't been for some boys. One time, in a village in southern France, a school-teacher, who was getting on in years, took his small class of farmer boys outdoors to study surveying—setting up stakes and things, you know, the way George Washington used to do. It's a stony, barren land—this part of France—and[Pg 106] the fields are covered with pebbles. The teacher noticed that often when he sent a boy to plant a stake, he would stoop every once in a while, pick up a pebble and stick a straw into it! That's what it looked like! Then he would suck the straw. Well, to make a long story short,[15] these pebbles had on them the little clay cells of the mason-bee. Mrs. Mason-Bee fills these cells with honey, lays an egg in the honey, and when the babies come along—don't you see? In other words, Mother Bee not only puts up their lunch for them, but puts them right into the lunch! This makes it convenient all around; for, like almost all insect mothers, Mrs. Mason-Bee is never there after the babies come. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i117.jpg" alt="" /> MASON-BEE CELLS AMONG THE ROCKS </div> </div> There were so many of these pebbles scattered over the plain, and the bees that were building new homes or repairing old ones flew so straight and so fast between the pebbles and a near-by road that "they looked like trails of smoke," as Fabre expresses it. Now, you may well wonder why the bees flew clear over to that road to get dirt to build their nests when there was plenty of loose earth right at their own door-steps; right around the pebbles themselves. Isn't that queer? Well, here's something that sounds stranger still. Mrs. Mason-Bee takes those extra trips because a roadway is so much harder to dig in! It's not because she needs the exercise, goodness knows—this busy Mrs. Mason-Bee—but because the hard earth of the roadway makes the strongest homes; that is, when she finally gets it dug out and worked up. And here's another thing that will seem[Pg 107] odd at first; although the soil she thus works over must be dampened before she can plaster it into the walls of her home, she just won't use damp soil to begin with. Nothing will do her but dust, and dust that she herself scrapes from the roadway. The reason of this is that the moisture already in the soil will not answer at all. She has got to knead the soil carefully and thoroughly with saliva, which acts as a kind of mortar. This saliva, of course, she supplies. And the dust she works with must be as fine as powder[Pg 108] and as dry as a bone. Then it absorbs the saliva, and when it dries it is almost like stone. In fact it's a kind of cement, like that men use for sidewalks and for buildings and bridges. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i119.jpg" alt="" /> Copyright by Brown Brothers. FABRE STUDYING THE MASON-BEE </div> </div> But this wonderful old teacher and his boys[16] found that even this isn't all this little house-builder and house-keeper has to think of. She must have dust that is really ground-up stone! So she digs in the roadway where the bits of stone in this stony soil have been ground to powder and then packed hard by the wheels of the farmer's cart and by the hoofs of horses and oxen drawing their heavy loads. But what did Mrs. M. B. do for ground-up stone in the long ages before man came along with his carts? Mr. Earl Reed, who, beside being the distinguished etcher of "The Dunes," is a close observer of nature in general, tells me he has often seen a mason-bee gathering the pulverized stone at the base of cliffs. Evidently the mills of the wind and rain, that we have read of in previous chapters, had Mrs. B's wants in mind too. <h5>BEING A MASON-BEE FOR A LITTLE WHILE</h5> Now, just to show you one more thing about Mrs. Mason-Bee as a house-builder—how clever she is—let's try something right here. Let's suppose ourselves—yourself and myself—Mrs. Mason-Bees. We have got a home to build for some baby mason-bees that will be along by and by. Say we already know that we must use this stone dust of the roadway, and that we must make our mortar[Pg 110] not with water but with saliva. Here's the next problem: Shall the mixing be done where the building is going up over there? That's the way human masons do it. But Mrs. Mason-Bee evidently thinks otherwise, for at the very time she is prying up those atoms of dust with so much energy, you notice she is doing her mixing. She rolls and kneads her mortar until she has it in the shape of a ball as big as she can possibly carry. Then "buz-z-z-z!" Away she goes, straight as an arrow, back home, and the mortar is spread where it is needed. You see, after all, this is the best way. If she didn't turn the dust into mortar before she started, so a good-sized lump of it would stick together, she couldn't carry much of it at a time, and it would be forever and a day before she could get her house built. As it is, the pellets she carries are of the size of small shot; a pretty big load, let me tell you, for a little body no bigger than Mrs. Mason-Bee. And remember, this goes on all day long from sunrise to sunset. Without a moment's rest, she adds her pellets to the growing walls and then back she goes to the precise spot where she has found the building material that best suits her needs. In building a nest, the mason-bee, in going to and fro, day after day, travels, on the average, about 275 miles; half the distance across the widest part of France. All in about five or six weeks, she does this. Then her work is over. She retires to some quiet place under the stones, and dies. As I said, she never sees the babies she has done so much for. <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i121.jpg" alt="" /> SURFACE MOUNDS OF THE MASON-ANT There are mason-ants as well as mason-bees. This illustration shows the works thrown up by some mason-ants that Dr. McCook found in a garden path one morning in May. </div> </div> And although they are so stoutly built, the houses of the mason-bees, like those "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous[Pg 111] palaces" that Shakespere speaks of, finally go back to the dust. But while one of these little mothers is building a new home or repairing an old one left by a mother of the previous year, you would suppose the fate of the world hung on it; as indeed the fate of the world of mason-bees does. Scrape! Scrape! Scrape! With the tips of those little jaws, her mandibles, she makes the stony dust. Rake! Rake! Rake! With her front feet she gathers and mixes it with the saliva from her mouth. How eager and excited she gets, how wrapped up in her work as she digs away in the hard-packed mass in the tracks of the roadway! Passing horses and oxen, and the French peasants with their wooden shoes, are almost on her before she will budge. And even then she only flits aside until the danger has passed. Then down she drops and at it again! But sometimes, the boys and the teacher found, she starts to move too late—so absorbed is she, it would seem, in the thought of that tiny little home over there among the pebbles. Poor little lady! HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY <blockquote>Perhaps nothing in nature is more wonderful than an insect; particularly when you consider that he is only an insect! So, of course, whole libraries have been written about insects. Here are a few of the most interesting books dealing with the subject: Beard's "Boy's Book of Bugs, Butterflies and Beetles"; Comstock's "Ways of the Six-Footed"; Crading's "Our Insect Friends and Foes"; Doubleday's "Nature's Garden"; Du Puy's "Trading Bugs with the Nations." This about trading bugs is an article in "Uncle Sam: Wonder Worker," and tells how Uncle Sam "swaps" with[Pg 112] other nations to get rid of injurious insects and bring in useful ones. Grant Allen's "Sextons and Scavengers" ("Nature's Work Shop") tells many curious things about the sexton beetles; how, by tasting bad, they keep birds and things from eating them; why you will always find an even number—never an odd number—of sextons at work together; what they use for spades in their digging; why male sextons bury their wives alive, and why there is reason to believe that these weird little insects have a sense of beauty and of music. The same essay tells about the sacred beetle of the Egyptians, the insect that we know as the "tumblebug"; why first the Egyptians and then the Greeks regarded this bug as sacred; and why men and women wear imitation beetles for brooches and watch-charms to-day. But the greatest work on this famous beetle has been written by the famous French observer Fabre, "The Homer of the Insect." You will find this book, "The Sacred Beetle," in any good public library. Among other things Fabre gives a very minute description of the variety of tools used by the beetle; tells how two beetles roll a ball;[17] how they dig their holes; how they "play possum," and then (I'm almost ashamed to tell this) rob their partners! How they wipe the dust out of their eyes; about a tumblebug's wheelbarrow; why their underground burrows sometimes have winding ways; why there are fewer beetles in hard times; about their autumn gaieties; their value as weather-prophets, and how Fabre's little son Paul helped him in writing his great book. Allen's essay, "The Day of the Canker Worm" in "Nature's Work Shop," tells many interesting things about the Cicada, the locust that only comes once in seventeen years;[18] about Lady Locust's saw (it looks like a cut-out puzzle); about the clay galleries the locusts build when they come up out of the ground; how many times they have to put on new dresses before they finally look like locusts; why, at one stage of the process, they look like ghosts, and how they blow up their wings as you do a bicycle tire. (Fabre's book on the sacred beetle also deals, incidentally, with the Cicada.) Often one thing is named after another from a merely fanciful[Pg 113] resemblance, as, for instance, the "sea horse." But the mole cricket really seems to have been patterned on the mole; either that, or both the four-legged and the six-legged moles were patterned after something else. Mole crickets are very useful little people to know. You should see how they protect their nest-eggs from the weather and how and why they move their nests up and down with the change of the seasons. What good to the soil do the insects do that eat up dead-wood? Scott Elliott, in his "Romance of Plant Life," deals with this subject. The mining bees are very interesting, and some of these days, perhaps millions of years hence, they will be still more interesting, for they are learning to work together, although not to the extent that the bees and ants do. Working together seems to develop the brains of insects just as it does human beings. Thomson's "Biology of the Seasons" tells how the mining bees are learning "team-work." The tarantula spider is a relation of the six-footed farmers, you should know, although he is not an insect himself. In "Animal Arts and Crafts" in the "Romance of Science" series you will find how, in his digging, he makes little pellets of earth, wraps them up in silk, and then shoots them away, somewhat as a boy shoots a marble. The same book tells why the trap-door spider usually builds on a slope. It also tells why she puts on the front door soon after beginning her house. (This looks funny, but you wouldn't think it was so funny if you were a trap-door spider and you had a certain party for a neighbor, as you will agree when you look it up.) The door, by the way, has a peculiar edge to make it fit tight. What kind of an edge would you put on a door to make it fit tight? (Look at the stopper in the vinegar-cruet and see if it will give you an idea.) This book also tells about a certain wasp that makes pottery and gets her clay from the very same bank that certain other people depend on for their potter's clay. This wasp sings at her work and has three different songs for different parts of the work. </blockquote> <hr style="width: 65%;" />[Pg 114] <div class="figcenter"><div class="figborder"> <ANTIMG src="images/i126.jpg" alt="" /> THE FIELD MOUSE AND THE FARMER When we remember how much soil the field mouse worked over, and so made better, long before man's time on earth—to say nothing of what the mice have done since—doesn't it give an added and deeper meaning to the lines of Burns? <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve. What then? Poor beastie, thou maun live." </div> </div></div> </div> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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