The members of the God Envoy King's Legion discovered that fly eggs could be used as medicine, and were even a "universal medicine" to some extent. This was an accidental discovery.
In the early days, ants that first started to breed flies often fell ill and even died. The mortality rate of ants was several times higher than the average rate. But the death of ordinary worker ants is not a big deal, and no ants report this to the protagonist.
The reason why fly keepers are prone to diseases is because flies have a fascination with rotting objects, feces and corpses, and they have become walking virus spreaders. According to incomplete statistics, flies can cause as many as 65 kinds of diseases. , these diseases include typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis and so on. Some diseases do not infect ants, but some do and can even kill them.
Long-term contact with flies greatly increases the chance of infection, which is the culprit of the sudden increase in illness among ant breeders.
Fortunately, as flies have been raised for longer and longer, the scale has gradually expanded, and the breeding industry has been on the right track. The Angel King's Army no longer needs to capture flies from the wild, but mainly reproduces them within the breeding farm, and has begun to monitor flies. Breeding objects are screened and nurtured.
In this context, with the changes in the living environment of flies, flies in farms are no longer exposed to so many germs in the wild, and their food is provided by ants, which is less polluted, so the germs carried by flies are There are also fewer species and numbers, and the disease and mortality rates of fly-feeding ants are steadily declining.
However, overall, the disease and mortality rates of fly-feeding ants are still much higher than those of other working ants, and their average life span is also lower.
The protagonist later discovered something unusual about the colony of flies and ants.
He then took the time to study this issue specifically. In contrast, he also found that the disease rate of ants rearing fly maggots was almost the lowest among all ant species in the ant nest, which was in sharp contrast to the high prevalence rate of fly rearing ants. Compared.
The protagonist can speculate on the reason for the high prevalence of fly-feeding ants. After all, in human society, flies are unwelcome spreaders of germs and food contaminants.
But the ultra-low prevalence rate of fly larvae-feeding ants was something the protagonist did not expect.
By communicating with maggot-feeding ants, the protagonist discovers that the biggest difference between these ants and other types of workers is their food.
Although all ants distribute food uniformly, the fly larvae-rearing ants have some tricks that allow them to eat fly eggs conditionally.
Flies lay a large amount of eggs. In addition to being used to hatch the next generation of flies, most of these fly eggs are used as food. Because they are rich in protein, fly eggs are used as high-level food for male ants, queen ants and large worker ants. This part of the food is almost inaccessible to worker and soldier ants.
However, due to the large number of fly eggs, many fly eggs will be damaged due to various reasons even in the incubation room, such as being knocked damaged during transportation, being pinched by the jaws of ants with excessive force, being mixed into the incubation room. Fungal infection, moisture damage, naturally occurring abnormal eggs, etc.
These damaged fly eggs need to be disposed of in time, otherwise they will quickly become rotten and affect other healthy fly eggs.
These damaged fly eggs will not be regarded as high-end food. They are usually eaten directly by the feeder ants who find them. In this way, the fly maggot feeders rarely even need other food supplies to suffice to preserve the fruits.
The protagonist believes that the maggot-feeding ants ingest a large amount of fly egg food is the reason for the low incidence rate.
The protagonist has known before that although flies themselves are very "dirty", they rarely get sick and their own resistance is very strong.
Flies have a digestive system that is very different from other animals, and bacteria cannot do anything to them.
Common mammals need to eat food first, and the food is digested and absorbed in the stomach. However, flies digest the food first before eating, and then suck the digested food into the stomach in the form of liquid, and then The residence time in the stomach is only 7-11 seconds, and the bacteria have no time to multiply before being excreted from the body. This method of digestion is called in vitro digestion, and many insects also use this method of digestion.
The large number of hairs on the fly's surface, as well as its digestive and blood systems, can carry pathogens, which can then be transmitted to other organisms through contact with food. Because the infection of pathogens is completed during the feeding process of flies, flies only eat liquid food. Before eating, they must change the food from solid to liquid and swallow it into the front part of the intestine for storage, and then send it to the middle part of the intestine for digestion. Before eating, flies secrete a large amount of saliva on the food from the salivary gland ducts in the mouth (these salivary glands are located throughout the body). While eating, they also regurgitate the food stored in the foregut onto the food. Thus, during this process, pathogens located in the salivary glands or foregut are spread. During the feeding process, flies also excrete rapidly, and the excrement coming out of the hindgut can also spread pathogens to food. They will vomit, eat, and poop on the food. This eating method actually ensures the health and safety of flies.
However, even with such a digestive system, flies will still inevitably eat some germs and bacteria. If there are no countermeasures, they will eventually harm the fly's own body.
The way flies have evolved is that when encountering bacteria with the ability to reproduce rapidly, the fly's immune system will emit two globulin proteins, BF64 and BD2. Once in contact with the bacteria, it will "explode" and "die" with the bacteria. The emission of these two types of globulin is always in tandem, in pairs, and never messed up. It is worth pointing out that the bactericidal ability of BF64 and BD2 is hundreds of times stronger than penicillin.
Human scientists have long been committed to extracting BF64 and BD2 from flies for treatment. This purely natural antibiotic can help solve the increasingly serious problem of "superbugs" in the human world.
The contents of these two natural antibiotics are extremely high in fly eggs and young flies. When fly larvae breeders eat damaged fly eggs, they are ingesting a large amount of antibiotics.
In this world without synthetic antibiotics, there is no doubt that fly eggs have become a purely natural "panacea", which has a strong inhibitory and killing effect on various germs.
Although the protagonist does not understand the specific principle, he reaches a similar conclusion based on observation and reasoning.
He also experimentally caused disease-prone fly-feeding ants to start eating fly eggs. After a period of time, he found that the incidence rate dropped significantly, which verified his conjecture.
As a result, it was discovered that fly eggs can be used as medicines and health care products. The reason why the protagonist wants to retain a certain scale of fly breeding industry after the flying knight's mount is gradually replaced by bees in the future is precisely because of this demand.
For ants, this natural medicine is so valuable!
