In other cases, however—that is to say, with other species—social development has gone further, and, besides boring galleries, the mother-beetle excavates a number of cells in their walls, like rows of bedrooms opening out of either side of a passage. She does not, however, quite finish her bedrooms, but, whilst they are still incomplete, lays an egg in each, and when this hatches, the young beetle, then in its larval state, takes up the task where she left off, and in time completes it. All the while they are growing up the mother feeds the young ones, and, between the intervals of doing so, stops up the entrance to the cell with a “plug”—such is the word employed; “to what base uses we may return, Horatio!”—of ambrosia. In time, when they have acquired the full imago form, each female beetle flies away to make a burrow and rear a family of her own, and in some species she is accompanied in this marriage flight, as it may be called, by the male. In others, however, the males are wingless, and remain in the burrow, till, when their appointed time comes, they die. Whether the male, when winged, assists the female in her mining operations I am not quite sure, inasmuch as that point seems to be avoided in the accounts which I have been able to consult, but the wingless male would not be able to do so, as he would be left behind in the burrow when the female flew away to found another colony. The fungus, when it has once commenced to grow, increases very rapidly, so that if the number of beetles in the nest is much diminished, as, say, by some accident, the rest cannot eat enough to keep it down, and so, it would appear, are suffocated. It is asserted, however, that when the wingless males are deserted by the females, and would otherwise perish in this way, they all collect together in a few of the galleries and feast on the ambrosia there growing. By this means, we are told, they “prolong for a time their useless existence”—an ungrateful way of putting it, so it seems to me, as the poor things have already been useful in a very indispensable manner, so that their existence as a whole is anything but useless, and to separate a part of it from the rest and carp at that is silly as well as ill-natured. But it is the fashion to speak in this harsh way of the male insect, beginning with the drone bee; whereas when the female has done all that _she_ can do—which is often just to lay her eggs—nobody talks of _her_ useless existence. Fashion is a curious thing, and ants, even if they be automatons, are not the only creatures that do things automatically.