After a while, however, they gave it up and came to the
conclusion that life under such circumstances was clearly intolerable.
They never touched the honey, but resigned themselves to their fate like
officers and gentlemen. In less than two days, half of them had died of
hunger, rather than taste a dinner which was not supplied to them by a
properly constituted footman. Admiring their heroism or pitying their
incapacity, Hueber at last gave them just one slave between them all. The
plucky little negro, nothing daunted by the gravity of the situation,
set to work at once, dug a small nest, gathered together the larvae,
helped several pupae out of the cocoon, and saved the lives of the
surviving slaveowners. Other naturalists have tried similar experiments,
and always with the same result. The slaveowners will starve in the
midst of plenty rather than feed themselves without attendance. Either
they cannot or will not put the food into their own mouths with their
own mandibles.
There are yet other ants, such as the workerless _Anergates_, in which
the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet further. These wretched
creatures are the formican representatives of those Oriental despots who
are no longer even warlike, but are sunk in sloth and luxury, and pass
their lives in eating bang or smoking opium. Once upon a time, Sir John
Lubbock thinks, the ancestors of _Anergates_ were marauding
slaveowners, who attacked and made serfs of other ants.
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