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Updated: May 10, 2025
If this be so, then there is nothing very out-of-the-way in the idea that the ants have also produced the honey-tubes of aphides by their long selective action. It must be remembered that ants, in point of antiquity, date back, under one form or another, no doubt to a very remote period of geological time.
This consideration, I fancy, suggests to us the most probable explanation of the honey-tubes and honey-dew. Creatures that eat so much and reproduce so fast as the aphides are rapidly sucking up juices all the time from the plant on which they fasten, and converting most of the nutriment so absorbed into material for fresh generations.
Dr. Taschenberg enumerates 300 species of true ants'-nest insects, mostly beetles, in Germany alone; and M. André gives a list of 584 kinds, habitually found in association with ants in one country or another. Compared with these singular results of formican selection, the mere production or further development of the honey-tubes appears to be a very small matter.
Sugar seems to have been such a waste product, contained in the juices of the plant to an extent beyond what the aphides could assimilate or use up in the production of new broods; and this sugar is therefore secreted by special organs, the honey-tubes.
White of Stonehouse has also noted an exactly similar instance of formican providence. The connection between so many ants and so many species of the aphides being so close and intimate, it does not seem extravagant to suppose that the honey-tubes in their existing advanced form at least may be due to the deliberate selective action of these tiny insect-breeders.
The eyes remain, it is true; but only the big ones: the little ocelli at the top of the head, found amongst so many of their allies, are quite wanting in all the aphides. In short, the plant-lice have degenerated into mere mouths and sacks for sucking and storing food from the tissues of plants, provided with large honey-tubes for getting rid of the waste sugar.
That, however, would hardly account for the development of special secretory ducts, like the honey-tubes, in which you can actually see the little drops of honey rolling, under the microscope. But the ants are useful allies to the aphides, in guarding them from another very dangerous type of insect.
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