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If you notice carefully, you will see that it is a mistake to think of these insects as all of one kind, and you may have heard that they have been divided by those who have studied them, into three classes males, females, and neuters. It is about the neuters we will talk now, for these busy, unselfish little creatures do all that has to be done; the whole work of the ant-city is left to them.
They carefully stretch out the wings of the males and females, and pile the empty cocoons outside the nest ready for building; for waste and disorder are unknown in an ant-city.
Some of the rooms are hollowed out below the surface of the earth; these are the cellars where the baby-ants are kept warm in cold weather, while in summer they are taken by their watchful nurses to the cool upper storeys. Now I have read that every ant-city has its wary sentinel, to keep watch and ward, and give warning of the approach of the foe.
We are a long time reaching the ant-city, but it would be quite an insult to the Insect-family to give no thought to the most wonderful thing about it the "transformations" by which many of its six-legged members pass through their three distinct stages of existence; so it will be well to turn over a few pages in the story of the Butterfly, one of the family-branch called Lepidoptera, because its wings are covered with thousands of tiny scales, which enclose the colouring that makes them as softly tinted as the flowers upon the nectar of which it feeds.
Before we quite leave the ant-city, I should like to tell you that the eggs of ants grow while hatching, to accommodate themselves to the increasing size of the tiny creature within them.
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