Days in the life of a 98 year old Great Grandfather
ANTS ARE SMART LITTLE THINGS
How do ants know where to go, if a cake crumb you may drop, In minutes there are thirty, on them twenty more on top. Where do they come from, we keep everything extra clean, Thru-out the year in all our rooms, the sight of them unseen.
A delicacy, some people really eat them, deeply fried in butter, Grocers do not sell ants, they must find them in the gutter. Others that I know are red, or called fire ants by name, One can nip you on your arm, you’d feel it like a flame.
Ants love to go to picnics, especially if it’s a family of yours, Try to buy an anti ant policy, not a company for them insures. Sometimes I walk into a room, there I see one or two. I grab a magazine, a whack at them, they know what to do.
I’ve seen them in formation, a straight line like army training , They congregate somewhere in your house, after it’s been raining. A legion of ants build hills, with bits of dirt and grains of sand, The nerve, it’s not their property, they have no deed to the land.
A canister of bug juice for spraying, good riddance you may say, For every one you killed last night, two show up next day. God made those little critters, for reasons I’ll never know, Ordered Noah just take two, but they multiplied from the go.
98 years old – how wonderful and what a great ode to ants. The little blighters – there is no getting rid of them – you see them here, you see them there, you see them everywhere 🙂
Depending on the species, worker ants can live anywhere from just a few months to a few years but queen ants can live much longer. Queens of the harvester ant species Pogonomyrmex owyheei may live as long as 30 years (Porter and Jorgensen 1988)! Most queens probably live just one or a few years though, again depending on species.
Much like honey bees, most ant species can theoretically influence any female egg to develop into a queen using a number of different kinds of stimuli. Feeding larvae well enough to reach a certain size by a particular age as well as endowing eggs with large amounts of yolk can both push ants towards developing into queens. Temperature can also influence the development of eggs. Some species tend to develop into queens if reared closer to the optimal temperature for larval growth and other species require a period of chilled overwintering to develop into queens. Just like in all social insects, the mere presence of a queen may prevent additional queens from developing though as a colony’s queen ages, the worker ants are likely to produce more and more queens.
However, a few species of ants have a genetic system of caste determination and are not able to produce queens from any female egg. Eggs of these species (Pogonomyrmex barbatus and P. rugosus) are predetermined to be workers or queens by the version of a particular gene that they have. Queens have to be sure to mate with at least one male with each version of the gene or they will be unable to produce both workers and queens. This type of caste determination is incredibly rare and its discovery has led to a lot of research but we still don’t know exactly how or why it evolved.
Ben Rubin & the AntAsk Team
Wow that’s a lot of knowledge about those ants, but they are a nuisance especially when all over the kitchen bench
Well you learn something new everyday…….still little pests though……