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Updated: May 28, 2025
Thus, in Eciton, there are working and soldier neuters, with jaws and instincts extraordinarily different: in Cryptocerus, the workers of one caste alone carry a wonderful sort of shield on their heads, the use of which is quite unknown: in the Mexican Myrmecocystus, the workers of one caste never leave the nest; they are fed by the workers of another caste, and they have an enormously developed abdomen which secretes a sort of honey, supplying the place of that excreted by the aphides, or the domestic cattle as they may be called, which our European ants guard and imprison.
Even the legs are comparatively little wanted by our modern aphides, which only require them to walk away in a stately sleepy manner when rudely disturbed by man, lady-birds, or other enemies; and indeed the legs are now very weak and feeble, and incapable of walking for more than a short distance at a time under exceptional provocation.
Why the aphides should have acquired the curious necessity for getting rid of this sweet, sticky, and nutritious secretion nobody knows with certainty; but it is at least quite clear that the liquid is a considerable nuisance to them in their very sedentary and monotonous existence a waste product of which they are anxious to disembarrass themselves as easily as possible and that while they themselves stand to the ants in the relation of purveyors of food supply, the ants in return stand to them in the relation of scavengers, or contractors for the removal of useless accumulations.
These are the Aphides sometimes unprettily called plant-lice, and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed as "blight" and they nourish themselves on vegetable juices, that thin green blood which is the plant's life. This, then, is the fruit which the birds have, come to gather.
But what good do the aphides themselves derive from the power of secreting honey-dew? For we know now that no animal or plant is ever provided with any organ or part merely for the benefit of another creature: the advantage must at least be mutual.
Sir John Lubbock found that his yellow ants carried the winter eggs of a species of aphis into their nest, and there took great care of them. In the spring, the eggs hatched out; and the ants actually carried the young aphides out of the nest again, and placed them on the leaves of a daisy growing in the immediate neighbourhood. They then built up a wall of earth over and round them.
Is there not something more than analogy in the two things, and is not the same life-giving force that evolves a million young Aphides from the germ stock of a single Aphis in a single season, the same in kind with the production of the living races of insects from a primeval ancestor?
The whole story is too long to give at full length, but here is a brief recapitulation of a year's generations of common aphides. In the spring, the eggs of last year's crop, which have been laid by the mothers in nooks and crannies out of reach of the frost, are quickened into life by the first return of warm weather, and hatch out their brood of insects.
Aphides, then, are essentially degraded insects, which have become almost vegetative in their habits, and even in their mode of reproduction, but which still retain a few marks of their original descent from higher and more locomotive ancestors.
The aphides are on the whole the most purely inactive and vegetative of all insects, unless indeed we except a few very debased and degraded parasites.
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