Our diligent little exemplars, the ants, are equally careful about their eggs. So soon as they are produced, the ants catch them up and convey them to a separate chamber, moistening them with their tongues, and incessantly turning them backwards and forwards. They are the objects of constant solicitude until they are hatched; they are carried hither and thither according as the temperature of the nest varies. On a sunny morning they are brought out and laid to bask in the warm air; but if the sky becomes overcast, and heavy clouds threaten rain, the careful nurses whip up the eggs and hasten with them down to the deepest recesses of the nest. They even appear to imitate the brooding of the hen, and sit upon the eggs to impart to them some of the warmth of their own bodies.
Before concluding this chapter, and entering upon the more striking manifestation of life in the form of the insect which will next come under our observation, it will be useful just to allude to the comparative number of eggs which some insects produce, which we shall place in the form of a table:--
The Noon-day Fly 2 The Flea 12 May Flies 100 Silk-worm Moth 500 Other Moths 1000 to 1600 Wasps 40,000 Bees 50,000
The most enormous number of all is produced by the queen of the white warrior ants. She deposits sixty eggs every minute, which is at the rate of 31,557,600 eggs in the course of a year, if we allow that she goes on laying at the same rate constantly, which is, perhaps, scarcely correct.
Were all the eggs produced by insects to be hatched and to bring forth living progeny, we may well ask what would become of mankind? Unquestionably in a short time their numbers would multiply so excessively as to sweep every green thing off the face of the earth, and man and beast would experience all the horrors of famine. But they are the sport of a thousand accidents, which destroy them and keep down the threatened excess of population in this world of busy creatures. And when the young larva has been put forth, this check upon their tendency to over multiplication is still more prominently displayed, as we may presently have occasion to remark.
[Illustration: FEROCIOUS LARVÆ OF DRAGON-FLY.
The generality of insects, as has been before mentioned, are destined never to behold the birth of their progeny, nor to experience either the pleasures or the cares of parents surrounded by their families. Their anxieties cease when they have carefully stored up their eggs, and their existence is generally soon afterwards at an end. The insect world, therefore, presents us with but few opportunities of witnessing the display of a parental affection on the part of its members; but, as was mentioned in the conclusion of the last chapter, a few examples of the kind do exist, and, perhaps, the very fact of their being few in number contributes to make them the more interesting to us. We have seen a noble instance of self-devotion on the part of a poor spider in defence of her eggs. Let us now turn to some examples of the love of an insect mother for her young larva. If the reader will carefully search the twigs and leaves of the birch-tree in the month of July he may possibly succeed in finding the little insect, the field-bug, of which mention is about being made, and witness for himself the strange spectacle described in the following account from the great work on insects by De Geer. In order that it may be recognised, we have here adjoined a representation of the insect. Its colour is a greenish gray on the back, dotted all over with very minute black spots; the under portion of the insect is greenish yellow, with black spots. It lives upon the sap of the birch-tree.