85人教版高中英语第一册第十四课 WATCHING ANTS

If you go into the fields and trun over a few big stones, you may uncover a city of ant “people”. You will see the workers, who gather food for themselves and for all the others. You will see the nurses, who care for the baby ants. And you will see some of the babies too.
While ants grow, they change their form three times. They start as tiny white eggs, and when these hatch, out come little fat white worms. These worms then weave silk cocoons around themselves, inside which they change from fat worms to ants. When the time comes, the cocoons are torn open by the ant nurses, and the new ants their tender legs and bodies are very gently helped out. You may see some of these new ants, still very pale in color.
A lucky vistor to the ant city may see the queen. She is much larger than the others and her hind half is very big because it is full of eggs. Laying eggs is her full-time job. She may have tens of thousands of babies in one summer. The nurses keep her very clean, washing her with their tongues. From the outside, the workers bring her food. As the mother of many children, she is respected and taken good care of.
Not all the ants go out for food. Some have extra powerful jaws, These act as guards and soldiers in time of trouble. Some workers keep the tunnels and rooms clean All rubbish is carried out.
Ants are fond of sweet food. They often mild little bugs called ant cows. You can see ant cows on the leaves and flowers of many plants. These cow bugs drink much more sap than they can use. It passes right through their bodies, only getting a little thicker and sweeter. The ant knows how to milk them. It strikes a cow bug’s back with its forelegs and feelers. The cow bug seems to enjoy this, and presently a tiny drop of honeydew milk appears. The ant laps it up and goes to the next cow bug for more.
The ant is not gathering this food for itself alone. It has two stomachs in its body, one for itself and one for carrying food to “the folks back home”. When it returns, a nurse ant which has been busy indoors all day is sure to ask for honeydew. The two ants place their mouths together. The one which has the honeydew brings up a drop from its public stomach and passes it into the nurse ant’s mouth; later, the nurse will give some of her drop to the babies, or to the queen. This is how the whole city is fed.
When one ant wants food from another, it taps on the other’s head with its feelers, using a kind of telegraph code. They “talk” a great deal by this means. If you watch long enough, you will see many problems settled by this “tap-talking” with the feelers.