Judy Kleczkas age 10, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for her question:

Where do the parasol ants live?

Parasol ants are most plentiful around the Amazon of South America. They love the hot steamy climate of the tropics. The nest may be a complex city 30 feet wide and nine feet deep. A long ray of the workers walking back home looks rather like an Easter parade. For each little ant carries a circle cut from a leaf over her head like a parasol.

The busy workers however, do not go to all this trouble to shade themselves from the tropical sun. The leafy foliages is taken to cavities deep in the nest. There it is broken up and fed to beds of fungus. The parasol ants are vegetarians and this fungus is their only food. They are farmer ants, raising their own crops.