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Updated: May 28, 2025
If the facts I have described are sufficient to show that some plants are benefited by supplying ants with honey from glands on their leaves and flower-buds, I shall not have much difficulty in proving that many plant-lice, scale-insects, and leaf-hoppers, that also attract ants by furnishing them with honey-like food, are, similarly benefited. The aphides are the principal ant-cows of Europe.
This last-mentioned yellow meadow-ant has carried the system of domestication further in all probability than any other species among its congeners. Not only do the yellow ants collect the root-feeding aphides in their own nests, and tend them as carefully as their own young, but they also gather and guard the eggs of the aphides, which, till they come to maturity, are of course quite useless.
They are subject to the attacks of an ichneumon fly, which lays its eggs in them, meaning its larvæ to feed upon their living bodies; and the ants watch over the aphides with the greatest vigilance, driving off the ichneumons whenever they approach their little protégés.
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 larvae.
Ants, especially, are very fond of this fluid, so that a line of aphides, extending from the base to the summit of a leaf, may frequently be observed slowly advancing toward the orifice of the cup, down which they disappear, never to return. Flying insects of every kind are equally drawn to the plant; and directly they taste the fluid, they act very curiously.
They are the aphides on the rose of art. But the men and women I speak of as ARTISTS are those who work day and night to attain even a small degree of perfection, and who are never satisfied with their own best efforts.
Their wings, especially, are useful to the perfect forms in finding one another, and to the imperfect ones in migrating from one plant to its nearest neighbours, where they soon become the parents of fresh hordes in rapid succession. Hence various kinds of aphides are among the most dreaded plagues of agriculturists.
Sir John Lubbock, who has paid great attention to the mutual relations of ants and aphides, has even shown that various kinds of ants domesticate various species of aphis.
The proprietor of a tree, finding it covered with these exploited beasts, cleared it of its inconvenient guests by repeated washes; but the dispossessed Hymenoptera, considering that this pasture close to their nest was very convenient for a flock, resolved to repopulate it, and for some time these tenacious insects could be seen bringing back among the foliage Aphides captured elsewhere.
And the bailiff stared, and kept on rubbing his nose with the hard brim of his felt hat, while he watched John Grange's fingers run up the tender young shoots, and, without injuring a blossom, busy themselves among those where the green aphides had made a nursery, and were clustering thickly, drawing the vital juices from the succulent young stems.
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