Ants - a retrospect

I meant to write this post in summer.  Because in the gloam of November when their heaps are low rounded humps glistening with clay slick it is harder to record their flight.

I was kneeling, uprooting weeds from among the raspberries, when I first saw the procession.  Worker ants, who like to roam seemingly aimlessly hither and yon were spacing themselves in single file up and along a blade of broad meadow grass.  They were communicating with each other antenna to antenna, monitoring the larger ants, the ones who were preparing to fly.  These came out of the loosened soil, their translucent wings folded close to their bodies.  It was time to catch the breeze.

I straightened up.  Ants were swarming, from beneath our raised beds, from below the marrows, emerging from cracks in the grassy paths, climbing the low boughs of the apple tree where they had been farming the aphids.  There are ecological ways of dealing with ants, nematodes for example.  One day, perhaps.

But if I had watered those microscopic parasites in deadly solution into the nest, I would never have seen the ants moving in harmony.  I left off weeding to watch them, not just on our patch but all over. 

The winged ants took themselves along the blades of grass or up the trunk and low boughs of the Bramley, and waited for the breeze.  They wriggled their segmented bodies into position and lifted their wings in anticipation.  Then the moving air uplifted them and they were off, up and away.  Finally, the wingless workers themselves disappeared.  Only a few wandered, aimlessly, seemingly, upon the newly weeded ground.

At the end of the afternoon, as we walked home I kept a look out for ants emerging through cracks in the pavement.  It was not difficult if you knew where to focus.  To me, it seemed that all the ants of Essex were on the wing.

It soon comes to an end.  I have seen queens divested of wings, searching for a sheltered crevice, ready to start a life of subterranean motherhood; ready to give birth to an empire of ants.

But that is not what amazes me.  The ants have no internet, no telegraph or semaphore.  No landlines run from heap to heap.  They are 'little upon the earth' says the Book of Proverbs.  Yet on one afternoon, at one time, on one day in July, they launch themselves into the air for that coordinated moment of connubial flight.