Tommy Somach, age 8, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, for his question:
What in the world is an ant cow?
The ant cow's world is very small. The little creature can squat on the head of a pin and usually her color is leafy green. From this you can guess that she is not related to Brown Bessy and the other big cows that graze in the meadow. But there are reasons why we call her a cow.
Ants, of course, live in a tiny world and the idea of ants keeping regular barn¬yard cows seem ridiculous. Nevertheless, some ants really do keep cows of a sort. Naturally their cows are scaled down to an ant sized world. They do not give milk, cheese and butter but instead, they give honeydew. The ant cows ooze this sweet, sticky stuff and the ants who own them love to lick it from their bodies. The little green honeydew cows are kept by cornfield ants. And nests of cornfield ants are found here and there all over our land.
This is a true story of the miniature world of insects. The cornfield ants are shiny brown insects and hundreds of .them live together in each busy nest. Their leafy¬ green cows are insects called aphids. They are much smaller than the ants and they belong to a different group of insects. Ants are very busy bugs, very strong for their size and always on the go.. Aphids are rather lazy bugs that feed by sucking the juices of soft roots and tender plant shoots. The aphids that are called ant cows are so lazy and helpless that they could not make a living without the tender care of the ants who own them.
The ant cows lay their eggs in cozy burrows down inside an ant nest. The busy ants protect them all winter. When the eggs hatch in the spring they carry them out to pasture. All the young cows are females and so are the ants who tend them. The ants settle their baby cattle in the roots of knotweeds and other grassy plants. There the little green cows sip root sap until summer dries up the meadows. By this time the farmer's corn has started to grow. The busy ants scurry around carrying their cows from the pasture to the cornfields. The hungry ant cows change to a diet of sap from the tender young corn roots.
Through the summer the ant cows lay several more batches of eggs. All of them are fatherless females. But in the fall they lay eggs that become males and females. When these youngsters grow up they pair off and marry. The mothers lay the last batch of eggs of the season. These eggs become the young female ant cows that hatch in the spring. Ant cows and other aphids weaken and often destroy corn and other crops by sucking their juices. They are rated as insect pests and some types attack our roses and other favorite garden plants.
The eggs of ants hatch into hungry grubs. The grubs become sleepy cocoons that hatch into fully grown ants. The eggs of the ant cows hatch into miniature copies of their mothers. As they grow, they shed their skins for bigger ones. This is called molting and the growing aphids are called nymphs. Ant cow nymphs molt several times. Then they are fully grown and ready to lay eggs of their own.