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Updated: May 28, 2025
Four times they moult their skins, these moults being in some respects analogous to the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into chrysalis and butterfly. After the fourth moult, the young aphides attain maturity; and then they give origin, parthenogenetically, to a second brood, also of imperfect females, all produced without any fathers.
They have domestic animals, and indeed it is not going too far to say that they have domesticated more animals than we have. Of these the most important are Aphides on trees and bushes; others collect root-feeding Aphides into their nests. They serve as cows to the ants, which feed on the honey-dew secreted by the Aphides.
But as the excretion is extremely viscid, it is no doubt a convenience to the aphides to have it removed; therefore probably they do not excrete solely for the good of the ants.
The ancestors of the aphides were free winged insects; and, in certain stages of their existence, most living species of aphides possess at least some winged members. On the rose-bush, you can generally pick off a few such larger winged forms, side by side with the wee green wingless insects.
J.E. must have walked many hundreds of miles among my hops with the horses drawing "the mistifier," a syringing machine which pumped a mist-like spray of soft soap and quassia solution upon the under-side of the hop-leaves, when attacked by the aphis blight; and he must have destroyed many millions of aphides, for the blight was an annual occurrence at Aldington, and taxed our energies to the utmost at one of the busiest times of year.
In Switzerland the slaves and masters work together, making and bringing materials for the nest: both, but chiefly the slaves, tend, and milk as it may be called, their aphides; and thus both collect food for the community. In England the masters alone usually leave the nest to collect building materials and food for themselves, their slaves and larvæ.
Holding to the top of the burr with their hind legs they seemed to drink head down from out of the base of the burr. Picking one of these, I found a hole at its base, and inside, instead of seeds, a hollow filled with plant lice or aphides, that the bees were milking. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow wasps drinking from the same pail.
But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would crush a fragile plant louse. I picked another burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued from the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, held in the thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet. In burr after burr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides for the bees to puncture and drain.
The enormous rapidity of reproduction in the family of aphides is the true cause of our helplessness before them. It has been calculated that a single aphis may during its own lifetime become the progenitor of 5,904,900,000 descendants. Each imperfect female produces about ninety young ones, and lives long enough to see its children's children to the fifth generation.
To these two groups let us add the social parasites, represented by thieves, drunkards, and persons of the baser sort whose business it is to trade in human passion. We revolt from the red aphides upon the plant, the caterpillar upon the tree, the vermin upon bird or beast. How much more do we revolt from those human vermin whose business it is to propagate parasites upon the body politic!
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