Maturer age buys the ants by the quart, presses
out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very
sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I am credibly
informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment upon it, taken
internally.
The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for the
Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and it
affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that
personal vices are public benefits--_vitia privata humana commoda_. The
honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted
himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a
living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may help
themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to
which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault, and only one
particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from their
expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing honey
within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their
round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules of skin
enclosing the pale amber-coloured honey, these Daniel Lamberts of the
insect race look for all the world like clusters of the little American
Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the
end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday life
the awful fate of Mr.
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