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Under some of them was broad grassy shade; but the surrounding wall of vegetation cut off all breeze. The way was intersected by many roads of leaf-cutting ants, as level, wide and well-built in their proportion as the old Roman highways, with such an industrious throng going and coming upon them as one could find nowhere equaled, unless it be on the Grand Trunk Road of India.
Caterpillars, plant-lice, bugs, and insect pests of all kinds were numerous, and did much harm to my garden; but the greatest plague of all were the leaf-cutting ants, and I had to wage a continual warfare against them.
Often, however, the brushwood has been cut down and burnt, and fresh crops of corn grown several times before the grass has gained such an advantage that the cultivator gives up the attempt to plant maize. There is then a struggle between the weedy shrubs and the grass. The leaf-cutting ants come to the aid of the latter. Grass they will not touch, excepting to clear it away from their paths.
This was the vision which flashed through my mind as I began vigil at an enormous nest of Attas the leaf-cutting ants of the British Guiana jungle. In front of me was a glade, about thirty feet across, devoid of green growth, and filled with a great irregular expanse of earth and mud.
And all in silence and in dim light, legions passing along the little jungle roads, unending lines of trembling banners, a political parade of ultra socialism, a procession of chlorophyll floats illustrating unreasoning unmorality, a fairy replica of "Birnam Forest come to Dunsinane." In their leaf-cutting, Attas have mastered mass, but not form.
The leaf-cutting ants are confined to tropical America; and we can easily understand that trees and vegetables introduced from foreign lands where these ants are unknown could not have acquired, excepting accidentally, and without any reference to the ants, any protection against their attacks, and now they are most eagerly sought by them.
I have, in conclusion, to relate an incident I onco witnessed, and which does not show the Monedula in a very amiable light. I was leaning over a gate watching one of these wasps feeding on a sunflower. A small leaf-cutting bee was hurrying about with its shrill busy hum in the vicinity, and in due time came to the sunflower and settled on it.
In June 1869, very soon after the formation of my garden, the leaf-cutting ants came down upon it, and at once commenced denuding the young bananas, orange, and mango trees of their leaves. I followed up the paths of the invading hosts to their nest, which was about one hundred yards distant, close to the edge of the forest.
He perceived the ants were becoming interesting, and the nearer he drew to them the more interesting they became. Gerilleau abandoned his old themes almost suddenly, and the Portuguese lieutenant became a conversational figure; he knew something about the leaf-cutting ant, and expanded his knowledge. Gerilleau sometimes rendered what he had to tell to Holroyd.
Belt has shown, bears hollow thorns and produces honey from a gland in each leaflet, in order to allure myriads of small ants which nest in the thorns, eat the honey, and repay the plant by driving away their leaf-cutting congeners.
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