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Updated: August 19, 2024
Not content with watching over their cattle, the ants brought up grains of damp earth, and built domed galleries over them, in which, under the vigilant guard of their savage little attendants, the scale-insects must, I think, have been secure from the attacks of all enemies. Many of the leaf-hoppers species, I think, of Membracis were attended by ants.
Plant-lice, scale-insects, and leaf-hoppers furnish ants with honey, and in return are protected by the latter. Contest between wasps and ants. Waxy secretions of the homopterous hemiptera.
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.
And so John Flint went to school to the government of the United States, and carried its little text-books about with him and taught them to others in even more need that he; and heckled hopeless boys into Corn Clubs; and coaxed sullen mothers and dissatisfied girls into Poultry and Tomato Clubs; and was full of homely advice upon such living subjects as the spraying of fruit trees, and how to save them from blight and scale-insects, and how to get rid of flies, and cut-worms, and to fight the cattle-tick, which is our curse; and the preservation of birds, concerning which he was rabid.
Our beautiful fruits, especially those of California, had come to be very extensively used throughout the empire, and the German consumers had been growing more and more happy and the German producers more and more unhappy over this fact, when suddenly there came from the American side accounts of the scale-insects discovered on pears in California, and of severe measures taken by sundry other States of our Union to prohibit their importation.
In the tropics their place is taken in a great measure by species of Coccidae and genera of Homoptera, such as Membracis and its allies. This ant took great care of the scale-insects, and attacked savagely any one interfering with them, as I often found to my cost, when trying to clear my pines, by being stung severely by them.
I noticed three different species, all, as far as I know, confined to the Cecropiae, and all farming scale-insects. As in the bull's-horn thorn, there is never more than one species of ant on the same tree. In some species of Melastomae there is a direct provision of houses for the ants.
We have seen that by many species of plant-lice, scale-insects, and leaf-hoppers, a honey-like fluid is secreted that attracts ants to attend upon them. In many of the Homoptera, this secretion only amounts to a white powder covering the body, as in some of the Fulgoridae. In others it is more abundant, and it reaches its extreme limit in a species of Phenax that I found at Santo Domingo.
This same Scutellista parasite had, curiously enough, been previously introduced in an accidental manner into Italy, probably from India, and probably in scale-insects living on ornamental plants brought from India.
It has discovered that 57 species of birds feed upon scale-insects dreaded enemies of the fruit grower. It has shown that woodpeckers as a class, by destroying the larvae of wood-boring insects, are so essential to tree life that it is doubtful if our forests could exist without them.
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