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Updated: May 28, 2025
The eggs correspond to the seeds; the various generations of aphides budding out from one another by parthenogenesis correspond to the leaves budded out by one another throughout the summer; and the final brood of perfect males and females answers to the flower with its stamen and pistils, producing the seeds, as they produce the eggs, for setting up afresh the next year's cycle.
The exact scene is usually on the young and succulent branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft shoots the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts, in search of the sap off which they live so contentedly through their brief lifetime.
So completely have some species of ants come to recognise their own proprietary interest in the persons of the aphides, that they provide them with fences and cow-sheds on the most approved human pattern.
The common brown garden-ant, one of the darkest skinned among our English races, 'devotes itself principally to aphides which frequent twigs and leaves'; especially, so far as I have myself observed, the bright green aphis of the rose, and the closely allied little black aphis of the broad bean.
in proportion to their own small size; you will read also strange stories of how they collect the eggs of those little green insects which you may see in such numbers upon a rosebud, and tend them with great care because these tiny aphides are their "cows," and they "milk" them by gently stroking them with their antennae, and so obtain a kind of honey also how the red and black ants occupy the positions of masters and slaves, the blacks doing all the hardest work, and being kept strictly indoors; and how it is not all work, even with the workers, for they have been caught at play, having high games of leap-frog and hide-and-seek!
These were little soft-bodied dark-coloured insects, looking like aphides, but more robust, and with the hind segments turned up. From the end of these the little larvae exuded drops of honey, and were assiduously attended by small ants belonging to two species of the genus Pheidole, one of them being the same as I have already described as attending the glands on the passion-flower.
It would be added by many that the ant gives us another parallel in its keeping of droves of aphides, which it "milks." But it is now doubted if the ant deliberately cultivates the aphides with this aim. Early weaving might arise from the plaiting of grasses.
Then the aphides! Exhausters of strength vine fretters plant destroyers! One aphis, often the progenitor of over five thousand million aphides in a single season. This seems understated, but I accept it as the aphidavit of another noted helminthologist. I might have imagined Nature had a special grudge against me if I had not recalled Emerson's experience.
She feasted thus for four or five minutes, but I am sorry to add that, unlike the humane ants, who care tenderly for their aphides and preserve their lives by kind treatment, the earwig ended by munching up the unfortunate aphis, till not a trace of it was left.
They have been known to repopulate their territories after an epidemic, or at least after the destruction of their Aphides.
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