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Updated: June 14, 2025
They pursue this labour very diligently, and no strange shoot escapes their investigations. Thus cared for, their culture flourishes, and at the epoch of maturity the grains are collected one by one and carried within. Like all harvesters, these Hymenoptera are at the mercy of a shower that may fall during the harvest.
Order HYMENOPTERA. "In this order the Formicidæ and the Poneridæ are very numerous, as they are in other damp and woody tropical countries. Seventy species of ants have been observed, but as yet few of them have been named.
Even in the upper and damp region I procured very few, excepting some minute Diptera and Hymenoptera, mostly of common mundane forms. As before remarked, the insects, for a tropical region, are of very small size and dull colours. Mr.
On bright, crisp mornings a striking optical effect may frequently be observed from the shadows of the higher mountains while the sunbeams are pouring past overhead. Then every insect, no matter what may be its own proper color, burns white in the light. Gauzy-winged hymenoptera, moths, jet-black beetles, all are transfigured alike in pure, spiritual white, like snowflakes.
The various other families of aculeate Hymenoptera are doubtless more abundant than the species recorded indicate, and it may be safely reckoned that the parasitic Hymenoptera in Ceylon far exceed one thousand species in number, though they are yet only known by means of about two dozen kinds collected at Kandy by Mr. Thwaites. Order LEPIDOPTERA.
Now, since instinct is nowhere so developed as in the insect world, and in no group of insects so marvelously as in the hymenoptera, it may be said that the whole evolution of the animal kingdom, apart from retrogressions towards vegetative life, has taken place on two divergent paths, one of which led to instinct and the other to intelligence.
The enormous distance between the two things compared might furnish matter for discussion. In the present case, the distance no longer exists: we have to do with two insects very near akin, two Hymenoptera. Why, if they issue from the same mould, has one a sense which the other has not, an additional sense, constituting a much more overpowering factor than the structural details?
Thanks to his keenness of scent he soon discovers an ant-path bearing the special and characteristic odour which these Hymenoptera leave behind them, and he follows the track which leads to their nest.
To give an example amongst insects, in one great division of the Hymenoptera, the antennæ, as Westwood has remarked, are most constant in structure; in another division they differ much, and the differences are of quite subordinate value in classification; yet no one probably will say that the antennae in these two divisions of the same order are of unequal physiological importance.
Such is the human species, which represents the culminating point of the evolution of the vertebrates. But such also are, in the series of the articulate, the insects and in particular certain hymenoptera. It has been said of the ants that, as man is lord of the soil, they are lords of the sub-soil.
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