p. 348 | UMBRELLA ANTS by Santa Claus

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 9, 1890

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 16, No. 22.

UMBRELLA ANTS.

By Santa Claus

IN Mexico they have some queer ants. Eleanor P. Allen says that as she was walking along a Mexican road that was overhung with a great many bushes, she came to a stone bridge across a narrow stream. A diagonal stripe of dark green, more than a foot wide, lay across the solid low stone parapet that protected the bridge, and wandered off beyond into the roadway. The children with us were amused and delighted to see a vast army of tiny ants come marching over the wall and down into the road.

Each one of the little creatures carried in a fore-paw(?) up over its head a circular bit of leaf about the size of a very small pea.

They marched in perfect order, and were marshaled by outside guards, who did not carry the little green leaf, but, instead, attended to the procession. They were umbrella ants. They cut these circular plates with their nippers from the leaves of certain trees, and these ants were in the act of carrying them to their nests. There they paste them (with a secretion of their own) one above another, like fish-scales, to their walls, and so make a firm and dry lining to their sand houses.—Santa Claus.