Ants Are Social Insects

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Destroying an anthill at my summer cottage, I always feel a pang of conscience: perhaps I destroyed civilization. It is not for nothing that ants are called "social insects". Their way of life can be envied. Each ant clearly knows its responsibilities, understands the meaning of its life. No one seeks to arrange a revolution in order to take a privileged position as the womb of the family or to change the functions performed for easier ones

Family unit

The name of the insect "ant" is consonant with the name of the grass-ant, creeping under your feet with a soft, unpretentious carpet. The grass quickly conquers space, leaving no chance for other plants to take root here. If its integrity is forcibly violated, the murava literally restores its losses before our very eyes.

Ants behave similarly. As soon as one scout is convinced of the safety of the path, a whole chain follows him. They run in a friendly stream in search of food, leaving an acid trail behind them, along which they have to return to their anthill. If a part of the chain is destroyed, ants in panic begin to randomly rush from side to side, but after a while they restore the "wound", and the stream continues its organized run.

Although ants belong to the order of Hymenoptera insects, only a female with a male is equipped with purely symbolic wings (memory of ancestors - wasps). Why symbolic? Because the male loses his wings when he is given access to the female for procreation. After fertilization, the female also sheds her wings, as if resigning herself to her, albeit royal, but monotonous role. If people followed the example of ants, there would be fewer divorces and abandoned children.

Thousands of wingless worker ants work tirelessly in search of building material for anthills. One can be surprised to observe how the ant persistently drags a chip, which is three times longer than itself, or other ants help it. To feed the queen-queen, often the worker ants themselves remain hungry.

When someone destroys an anthill, workers grab the larvae and with great agility try to leave the site of the disaster. They flee in search of a new safe place to start building their home anew.

Skillful architects and builders, tailors

Being skillful builders, ants build their abode from stalks of grass, chips, pine needles, sand, thus being forest cleaners. They are so skillful and conscientious builders that it is not easy to destroy an anthill by leveling it with the surface of the earth.

Some ants sew themselves nests from leaves, using the spider glands of their larvae instead of threads. Holding the larva with its jaws, the ant applies it first to one leaf, then to another, and the web sews the leaves, turning them into a flat cloth. Such spherical ant nests are very impressive in size.

"Cash cow" ants

For summer residents, the ants themselves are not so terrible as their "cash cows" - aphids. The gluttonous aphid eats more than its body needs. She secretes excess food in the form of a sweet liquid, which others, including ants, like to eat up after it. They wiggle aphids with their antennae, which looks like milking a cow from the side, and lick sweet drops.

In gratitude for the "milk" ants protect their "milk cows" from the enemies of aphids - ladybirds; surround the aphids with tender care; help them build or sew housing. If you notice a lively fussing of ants around the plant, take a closer look at the leaves. Perhaps aphids are already celebrating a housewarming there - a malicious enemy of the gardener.

Killer ants

There are killer ants. In Australia and southwest Africa, they terrify tourists. Local residents have learned to cooperate with warlike ants, entrusting them with the protection of leguminous plantations. The ants do not eat beans and keep other pests away from them by successfully eating them.

Ant remedies

In Russia, no cases of ants eating people have been recorded. But they still annoy gardeners, being guardians of aphids, eating wooden parts of greenhouses and garden beds.

If you decide to rid your site of the presence of ants, I suggest several simple ways:

* I heard that ants don't like the smell of parsley. My experience has not confirmed this. Perhaps the advice was too late - the ants have already adapted to the smell, or my variety of parsley is not so fragrant, because it can be different.

* I do not like to use pesticides, so I water the nests with boiling water. They disappear for a while, then reappear.

* Once, in a neglected secluded corner of the garden, I discovered an anthill, half a meter high. She barely stirred it up with a shovel and made a fire in this place. The fire did not want to flare up, the ants extinguished it with their acid and, grabbing the ant eggs, scattered in different directions. For a while, there was a relative calm.

It's a pity to destroy them completely. But, if you do not periodically arrange a war with them, they can easily oust the summer resident from the land, for which a lot of money was paid (although the Creator provided people with land for general use and completely free of charge) and a lot of work was spent.