Ants in the wood

As the light fades Lou and I are listening to the woods through the open french window in our bungalow here in the depths of Flatroper’s Wood. Wood pigeons and stillness. We had two cars come down here all day, in convoy, a guilty looking lady and a guilty looking man. Lou and I were going for a walk and they turned around and came back out again thankfully, rather than hoping we would press our faces against their window while it all got steamy.

We went for a walk. Nobody else, little pathways, easy enough to start to feel lost the deeper you go. Last time I was here I didn’t notice so many anthills. Wood Ants. There’s a hill establishing in the garden here, which is currently only small but they can get very very big. I remember them from Switzerland growing up, but never seen them over here before. They are a native species though.

The domes they create are busy and distinctive. They’ve made a smaller one than the photo near Bella’s rose garden which will be a good hunting ground for them for aphids, which they harvest for honeydew. It’ll keep the aphids off the roses. Wood Ants are bizarre and wonderful creatures. They domesticate their aphids, keep them alive and milk them like cows.

As a kid in summer in Switzerland I must have spent days of my life with Max observing these big ant piles. Sometimes a grasshopper would land on one. Or a wasp would fight some of them. Sometimes thousands of ants would drag a dead bird across a road towards one, and it was like some weird zombie. We would watch them go to war with another dome for territory, watch the battle lines drawn and the convoys bringing back the dead and wounded and replacing them with fresh troops in extended futile stalemates that might extend into a road and get broken by the tyre of a car. They clean things up though. But they are also hungry for small insects.

I tend to think of ant-hills as a single organism. An anthill is really just the queen. If you kill the queen you’ll end up with a dead nest. Every ant is an extrusion of that one life force and will, birthing what the colony needs when it needs it, extending territory, hunting resources.

Wood ants are a very benign example of formicidae so I’m not worried about them being in the garden. Sure the drones were flying into my ear in bed two nights ago but that’s only one night a year. Most of the time they just mind their own business, and I doubt they’ll come into the house. They aren’t biters like those little red fuckers. And they won’t hurt you if they get trapped – it’s a little prick of a bite and I should know, I basically played with the damn things every summer for a year. “What happens if I stick this lolly stick in the nest OW you pushed me, now they’re all up my ARM OW.”

The day birds are passing shift over to the night birds. Somewhere far away there’s a cow shouting. The last of the light is fading and a little breeze is bringing in the night time rain.