INVASION of the FRIENDLY FLYING ANT
They work hard, take care of their babies and never bite us, so why are we afraid of the...
IT’S July, the season for the Flight of the Winged Ant. Thousands and thousands of ants with large clear wings bigger than their bodies, are pouring forth from holes in the ground, from under our patios, from behind the loose-fitting skirting boards, and are taking to the skies in clouds.
Ordinary ants are bad enough, but a sky full of flying ones? What is going on? Are these a new species arrived here because of climate change? Should we worry? Of course not. This happens every year around this time and is part of the lifecycle of our common garden ant.
They live in nests underground and all work for the good of their community. Ants originally had a good press. In the Aesop fable about the ant and the grasshopper, it was the grasshopper who was feckless, whiling away the summer as a guitar-playing layabout, while the good, industrious ant worked hard to prepare for the hard times ahead.
People are not a bit positive towards ants nowadays, though, and have a terrible aversion to having them on their property or, God forbid, in their houses.
The garden ant is a dumbbell-shaped insect with a large head and a large abdomen and a very narrow bit in between. It has no sting or bite that can affect us, so we are quite safe. It lives with the queen and all its worker sisters in a simple nest excavated in sandy soil. There are no structures in it as in, say, a bees’ or wasps’ nest. The ants live in a series of chambers and tunnels.
The queen has a royal chamber, of course, where she lays the eggs. She can lay one every ten minutes at the height of her powers, when she really gets going, and she can do this for up to six years. The workers then reverentially remove the eggs and hatch them out elsewhere. They get great attention from their worker sisters as they develop, being moved about the nest while they grow from egg to larvae to pupae.
They are even brought up to tunnels just under the surface on warm days so that they’ll grow big and strong even quicker.
All these young need lots of food, and the worker ants forage far and wide to gather it. Any particles that are small enough to be carried are painstakingly brought back to the nest to feed the others. If a good source of food is found, the ants communicate this to each other and soon a whole line of them is on the way to collect more. All these ants live underground in little tunnels, just big enough for them to move around in.
At certain times in summer the eggs the queen lays develop in to sexually mature adults. These have fine large wings (unlike the poor workers which are always undeveloped females). Nests at this time of year become like primary schools long ago and are either buachaillí or cailíni, and contain mainly male or mainly female mature adults.
DURING certain weather conditions – hot muggy July evenings – these mature adults erupt from all the local nests and have one glorious abandoned orgy in the air. As well as attracting the notice of hassled humans, all the aerial feeders in the bird world are attracted to the spot – swallows, swifts and even gulls – and there’ will be sex and violence and gluttony and murder all going on at the same time.
Very few ants survive this. It doesn’t really matter about the males: once they have done the business, they have no further role anyway. But the successfully mated queens who escape the depredations of the birds, fall to earth and the first thing they do is break off their wings, first one, then the other. You can easily observe this as you sit on your patio with your sundowner. They are then able to squeeze back underground and seal themselves up until spring.
They survive on the reserves supplied by the wing muscles that they no longer need. Good recycling, huh?
When spring comes, the queen ant starts a colony by laying the first batch of eggs and feeding them with her own saliva.
When they hatch out, she has her workers, so she can go into the egg-laying business full time.
So why are people so exercised about them? Well, from the ants’ point of view, people are very kind and have modified their homes and gardens to make life easier and better for them. In the first instance, they have removed the damp, heavy topsoil from a portion of the garden and replaced it with fine dry sand and roofed this sand with nice flat patio slabs. Perfect for tunnelling in and building nests – sand is so much easier to tunnel and build a nest in than soil, and the slab roof gets nice and warm, so good for the little growing larvae! And then, such convenience, this sandy habitat is just beside the house itself, into which access has been much improved through open glass double-doors, particularly on those hot days when ants are always so starving.
There’s always food to be found in the house, lots of tiny crumbs on the floor or on the worktop. Occasionally, the ants even hit the jackpot and find a food cupboard open with tears in the sugar bag, or no lid on the sugar bowl.
THEY have to be careful not to wander into the fridge if it is left open. It gets very cold and dark in there when the door is closed and they cannot move for the cold, even when the door is opened again. Ants are sure that the humans must be grateful to them for carrying away all the things that they spill on the floor and the patio.
But the humans are not, they are so ungrateful. They hoover up the poor industrious creatures, not caring how many babies are left to starve to death. They put down horrid ant poisons in the form of dusts sprinkled round the doors where they get in, not seeming to care if it blows on to their own food. Those that are averse to using poison pour kettles of boiling water down on top of the nest. That works very effectively indeed. As does sealing up loose skirting boards and radiator pipes with sealant if the ants are emerging in the house.
And all the time people do not seem to realise that they brought the problem on themselves by constructing the sand-based patio that screamed ‘come and live here’ to the ants. Nobody forced you to have that patio, so get rid of it if you really can’t abide the poor creatures.
Overall, though, there’s no getting rid of the ants – flying or otherwise. They are definitely here to stay.