That the worker-ants—and for that matter the others also—are extremely fond of the honey so curiously stored by them, will be easily believed, and an unpleasant illustration of their greediness in this respect was often observed by McCook when capturing a nest. The swollen bodies of the rotunds, on these occasions, were sometimes unavoidably ruptured, whereupon such workers as happened to be near these unfortunates, forgetting their alarm, which had hitherto been great, and the ruin and confusion all around them, paused in their flight, or aimless movements, and greedily lapped up the overflowing honey.[84] It is all the more interesting, therefore, to learn that when the “little life” of these poor honey-pots is at length “rounded with a sleep,” their contained treasure, though so easily obtainable, goes with them to the grave, the idea of opening the full crop, and imbibing the contents, never seeming to occur to any ant. This is all the more remarkable in that the workers, when they recognise that life is extinct, carefully separate the abdomen from the thorax by sawing through, with their mandibles, the little connecting stalk called the petiole. The two parts are then removed separately, that representing the head half being carried, whilst the “golden bowl” of the body “unbroken,” though with “the spirit fled for ever,” is rolled along the various chambers and galleries of the nest, till it finally finds a resting-place in the cemetery just beyond its precincts.[84] To what are we to attribute the non-utilisation of the honey in the dead body? Even were it possible that the ants could forget that it was there, they cannot be unconscious of what must be smelt, as well as seen, through the semi-transparent walls of the abdomen. Some feeling must restrain them—what, I am not prepared to say in a work which does not aim at being scientific.