Ant Colonies
Organized society, whether among insects or men, implies some form of government; and that implies citizenship.
And fidelity to the just and natural service of citizens is communal righteousness. May we apply such a term to insects?
And if so, what is the character of such a quality; or, if one may venture so to put it, what is the duality of such a character? And is it in any measure comparable with communal righteousness as the phrase goes amoung men? The inquiry will here be limited to ants; but the study requires the statement of some preliminary facts, so that readers may have a true conception of the field which our thoughts are to explore.
Some insects are "solitary"; they live alone. Others are "social"; they live in communities. There is such a striking contrast between the manners of the two groups that one wonders how the distinction arose. True, at the beginning of life most insects are massed, since their mothers lay their eggs in compact clusters. But if one start with the theory that this may have left in the germ of being a tendency which, under favorable conditions might be transferred to the adult, he is met by certain facts that may confound his reasoning.
For example, the eggs of ants and bees are dropped separately, yet they produce insects of the strongest social habits. The moth of the tent caterpillar oviposits in clusters, and her progeny keep together in the larval state. The eggs of the garden orbweaver, like those of most spiders, are laid in carefully sheltered masses, and the young are partly reared together in the silken tent which the mother overspins. Moreover, they start independent life in a self-woven silken compound. The lycosid, a ground spider, drags her round cocoon behind her until the eggs are hatched, and then bears the younglings about clustered upon her back. Yet soon the centrifugal factor in vital force drives the young of moth, orbweaver, and lycosid asunder, and thereafter their life is solitary.
With social insects the tendency is reversed. Beginning life solitary, as in the case of the maternal founder of an ant's nest, the individual becomes a family, and the family a community, and this may develop into a vast commonwealth containing many thousands or even millions of individuals. When the circle of life is complete, the vital centripetal force which binds these communities together is relaxed, in a movement of impassioned communal fervor, to allow the outgoing of the winged males and females, as with ants; or the swarming of a new community, as with bees. This is the "commencement" time in the insect calendar, when a matured sliver of the community is struck off and pushed into independent life.
Among ants these communities vary in population from a few score to many thousands. There are villages, towns, cities - each, for the most part, independent of all others, and each complete within itself, a separate tribe, a sovereign state. That the orderly and successful conduct of such communities must spring, consciously or unconsciously, from some system, is self evident. What is that system? What are its laws, its customs, its methods of administration? Is an ant-hill a monarchy, a republic, a democracy, a socialistic commune? How does its government compare - if in any wise comparable - with the civil governments of men? And what lessons in civics can we learn therefrom?
Surely, an interesting inquiry here opens up; for, whatever the result, it must give us a glimpse of nature pure and simple. To this this website's purpose is mainly directed; but, as a by-product of our studies, we confess a keen interest in those reflections that traverse the field of human civics, and which inevitably arise as one pursues the history of life in ant communes.
In many parts of the Alleghany Mountains, and in middle and eastern Pennsylvania, in New Jersey, in the White Mountains and elsewhere, are distributed the large conical nests of the mound-making ants of the Alleghanies, Formica exsectoides. These vary in size from newly begun colonies a few inches high to mature hills, measuring thirty-seven feet in circumference at the base, though rarely more than three feet high. They occur in groups; and in one site near Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, within a space of fifty acres, the writer counted seventeen hundred well-developed mounds. At two other localities in these mountains similar groups were observed even more thickly placed.
Ant hill, housing
the commune
Ant hill - housing the commune, nesting architecture
The housing of the commune is a duty that springs up side by side with the existence of the commune.
In the typical beginning of an ant community by the single fertilized queen, the first act of the incipient foundress is to scoop out and heap around her, in earth or wood, a cell whose diameter is somewhat greater than the length of her own body.
This is the rudimentary house of the commune - the primitive cave which bounds the architectural aim of most animals, and which is the starting-point with man himself.
With great numbers of species, this cave will be found under a stone. A flat stone, not too large and not deeply imbedded in the ground, if lifted up in the early spring, or at any time during summer, will be found to serve as a rocky roof which overspreads the vestibule and protects certain galleries, halls, and passages into an underground formicary. The mere fact of choosing such a location for a nest is significant; for, besides the protection and defence afforded, the stone absorbs the sun's rays and serves thus as a natural furnace, contributing to the warmth of the ants and of their immature young.
Like the ancient catacombs of Rome, which served primitive Christians equally for home, for sanctuary, and for cemetery, these subsurface chambers and galleries are arranged in irregular stories, one above another. They are simply the primitive cave in multiple, with intercommunicating passages. And they increase on the principle of any other social settlement-to meet the communal growth. Many of them reach immense proportions; most of them are comparatively small.
With the great army of woodworkers the same simple type of architecture prevails, modified simply and not largely by the material from which the public buildings are wrought. The storied subdivisions especially are crowded within a narrower space and are less distinctly marked. One who carefully studies the architecture of a long-established nest of carpenter ants will find himself unconsciously tracing out in miniature pillars, arches, aisles, vaults, and domes of different orders of architecture. It takes but a slight stretch of fancy to imagine that one is gazing upon the ruins of an ancient seat of a diminutive type of his own race, who had carved out their toy-like homes and temples in the solid wood.
One of the most interesting examples of the storied type of underground architecture is that of the honeyants of the Garden of the Gods (Myrmecocystus hortideorum), Colorado; the farthest north they had been observed. The approach to their nest was a small, low, pebble-covered mound with a large central gate which penetrated it vertically for a few inches, and then was diverted into various passages that followed the slope of the ridge on which the colony was planted. In one nest, chosen for complete exploration, excavation was carried forward during three days and several parts of days, two men working with mallet and chisel and with knife in the soft, red sandstone, or "puddingstone," of which the ridge is composed. The entire length of the formicary was seven feet eight inches.
The point at which it ended was forty and a half inches below the level of the main gate and twenty-nine and a half inches beneath the level of the hillside. In all, the ants had excavated thirty-six cubic feet of rock, and this space was honeycombed with galleries and rooms. The latter varied from five to six inches long, three to four wide, and about three-fourths of an inch high. The walls and floors of these rooms were smooth, but the roofs were left in their natural roughness, thus forming a better foothold for the rotunds, or honeybearers, who were perched upon them, clinging thereto with their claws, and closely clustered together.
The occident ant (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis) is closely related to the agricultural ant in structure and habit. But the typical forms vary decidedly in their exterior architecture, the occident having its commune overbuilt with a prominent cone coated with pebbles, while the typical agricultural keeps the space around its gate free from all growth. Both species, like the moundmaking ants of the Alleghanies, are among those that found and maintain vast communities, and therefore have a special interest to us in our present studies. Their homes are often wrought in a tough clay that is almost as hard to excavate as the red sandstone of the Garden of the Gods, and equally taxes the resources of the workers. The arrangement of rooms into stories is here also carried out, and to a surprising extent. In one nest of the occident ant a story was found at a depth of over eight feet beneath the surface.
Those who are curious in such comparisons might find grounds here for a striking parallel between the achievement of an ant three-eighths of an inch high (long), and of a man one hundred and seventy-six times as high (five and one-half feet). Were we to reckon a proportionate rate of progress between the two on the basis of height, our man would have to be credited with a storied structure one thousand four hundred and eight feet deep. Apart from such fanciful comparisons, it is certainly well calculated to excite our wonder that such insignificant creatures can, by their united exertions, bring, about results relatively so vast, unaided by mechanical contrivances.
The numerous chambers which in honey-ant structures are occupied by those living honey-pots, the rotunds, in the occident nests are used as store-rooms. Herein one finds various sorts of seeds put away for food. In a few cases rooms were found filled with husks and apparently sealed up, as if empty spaces had been utilized in the rush of business for "dumping-grounds," to save transporting the waste matter of the seeds to the outer gates and the kitchen middens. Perhaps these "relief chambers" were merely a temporary makeshift, and would have been cleared out in due course had not the commune suffered a destruction as dire as that of ancient Troy or Carthage.