Adlerz states that the females or young queens take no food while engaged in doing their early work, and that the large quantity of fat-body they possess enables them to undergo several months of hunger. In order to feed the young larvae they use their own eggs or even the younger larvae. It is to the small quantity of food rather than to its nature that he attributes the small size of the first brood of perfect workers. M. Janet[63] has recently designed an ingenious and simple apparatus for keeping ants in captivity. In one of these he placed a solitary female of _Lasius alienus_, unaccompanied by any workers or other assistants, and he found at the end of 98 days that she was taking care of a progeny consisting of 50 eggs, 2 larvae, 5 pupae in cocoons, 5 without cocoons. On the 102nd day workers began to emerge from the cocoons.[64] From these observations it is evident that the queen-ant, when she begins her nest, lives under conditions extremely different from those of the royal state she afterwards reaches. {147}In many kinds of ants the full-grown individuals are known to feed not only the larvae by disgorging food from their own mouths into those of the little grubs, but also to feed one another. This has been repeatedly observed, and Forel made the fact the subject of experiment in the case of _Camponotus ligniperdus_. He took some specimens and shut them up without food for several days, and thereafter supplied some of them with honey, stained with Prussian blue; being very hungry, they fed so greedily on this that in a few hours their hind bodies were distended to three times their previous size. He then took one of these gorged individuals and placed it amongst those that had not been fed. The replete ant was at once explored by the touches of the other ants and surrounded, and food was begged from it. It responded to the demands by feeding copiously a small specimen from its mouth: when this little one had received a good supply, it in turn communicated some thereof to other specimens, while the original well-fed one also supplied others, and thus the food was speedily distributed. This habit of receiving and giving food is of the greatest importance in the life-history of ants, and appears to be the basis of some of the associations that, as we shall subsequently see, are formed with ants by numerous other Insects. [Illustration: Fig. 60—_Oecophylla smaragdina._ Worker using a larva for spinning.]