Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
After this interval, I felt sure that the aphides would want to excrete. I watched them for some time through a lens, but not one excreted; I then tickled and stroked them with a hair in the same manner, as well as I could, as the ants do with their antennae; but not one excreted.
Even then, no doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet. Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personæ, a couple of small brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green 'plant-lice, or 'blight, or aphides.
One can readily imagine that it may at first have escaped in small quantities, and that two pores on their last segment but two may have been gradually specialised into regular secreting organs, perhaps under the peculiar agency of the ants, who have regularly appropriated so many kinds of aphides as miniature milch cows.
They are everywhere; in the earth, in the houses, and on the trees; they are to be seen in every room and cupboard, and almost on every plant in the jungle. To some of the latter they are, perhaps, attracted by the sweet juices secreted by the aphides and coccidæ.
Smelling their road cautiously to the ends of the branches, they soon reach their own particular aphides, whose bodies they proceed gently to stroke with their outstretched feelers, and then stand by quietly for a moment in happy anticipation of the coming dinner.
The blackbird had not gone near her after that, nor any of his relations and friends, and she had had a great many shooting and flying pains for months together, in consequence of aphides' eggs having been laid inside her stem eggs of which the birds would have eased her long before if they had not been driven away by her haughty rage. However, she had been almost glad to have some ailment.
Our best course is to take a basin of water and jar them off into it they fall readily and then scald them to death. We may discover lady- bugs small red or yellow and black beetles among our vines, and many persons, I fear, will destroy them with the rest. We should take off our hats to them and wish them godspeed. In their destruction of aphides and thrips they are among our best friends.
They have attained to a most complex and artificial civilization, and will frequently adventure far afield on colonising or other expeditions from whence they return with a rich booty of aphides and other stock, who thenceforward become the servants and domestic creatures of the republic. As they neither kill nor eat their captives, this practice will be termed kidnapping.
Huber and Lubbock have given to the world many startling facts, the significance of which may be gathered from the one statement that certain species of ants carry their devotion so far as literally to cultivate the aphides, carrying them bodily into their tunnels, where they are placed in underground pens, reared and fed and utilized in a manner which might well serve as a pattern for the modern dairy farm.
Millions of Aphides, or Plant lice, now infest our shade and fruit trees, crowding every green leaf, into which they insert their tiny beaks, sucking in the sap, causing the leaves to curl up and wither.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking