Word: queenly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...species Eciton hamatum, he found 65,000 citizens or more. Most of them were workers, virgin females up to four-tenths of an inch long, which are denied the work of reproduction by the laws of the tribe. In the colony there are one completely developed female, the queen, two-thirds of an inch long, and a few harried winged males, often transients from other colonies. These the ferocious virgins coddle, and hold in captivity. In time of hunger they may also devour them...
Stay-at-home workers pick up the squirming white larvae, over 30,000 of them, and carry them slowly over the same path. The winged males straggle along, licked and caressed by the workers, but bitten fiercely if they try to fly away. The queen comes too, guarded by a crowding escort of fanatical worshipers. She plunges into the mass of her subjects at the new bivouac and disappears. The colony has moved...
...happens every night until the larvae are enclosed in cocoons to change into motionless pupae. Deprived of the stimulation which they get from, the larvae's squirmings, the workers lose their restlessness. The whole colony marches into a hollow log. After a few days of this seclusion, the queen is gravid. Her abdomen swells enormously, and she lays some 30,000 eggs, which hatch into tender white larvae. When both larvae and "callow" ants are ready to travel, the colony becomes nomadic again...
...woman behind this non-commercial venture was almost a symbol of radio commercialism: Elaine Carrington, "Queen of the Soapers," who makes $200,000 a year by writing three soap operas...
With equal enthusiasm, Queen Elaine states the case for her craft: "Soap opera fills a tremendous need of people who have no life of their own. And my, there are so many lonely people in this world! I try to create situations that everybody can identify themselves with. And then, when everything turns out happily, everybody's happy...