Our house is receiving a lot of unwelcome guests since the warm weather ensued. I speak of ants. The little ones I can understand, they are racing around looking for real food. But the big black ants are another story. I never see them on a kitchen counter, just walking across our living room rug. Not an army of them, but one here one there. Are they after wood? Are they carpenter ants? I guess so. I noticed something very peculiar about them. The ones I stepped on are a day or so later carried away by a comrade. It is fascinating to see. Why do they do this? And where do they take the dead?
I knew that there was a verse about the industry of this insect in the Book of Proverbs. It reads: “Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways, and learn wisdom: Which, although she hath no guide, nor master, nor captain, provideth her meat for herself in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest” (6:6).
So, we have a lesson here, provided by the Creator, in this pest. The bee, of course, is very similar, even more intriguing. Both work out of colonies and both have workers who serve a queen. The queen in an ant colony has only one purpose, to lay eggs. The male workers actually feed her and remove her waste. Astounding is it not?
Sometimes the queen reproduces female ants. Apparently this is achieved, from what I have read, by using stored up sperm from a previous mating. I could find no explanation for why this stored sperm spawns female ants rather than male. In any event these female ants will also become queens. They are far larger than the male ants. When a colony has more than one queen, the older queen will stop reproducing, or slow down at least. Why? Because, the more male ants there are, the greater chance she will be killed. By instinct she knows that. The other over-productive and less experienced queen ants in the colony will then be attacked by the males and killed. However, the workers will not kill the last queen. Of course there are exceptions as ants are ants and sometimes they get a little “cracked” shall we say. That is suicide for the colony. I was astonished to read that the queen ant, left alone and fed by the males, can live even for thirty years. How about that!
Back to my earlier question. The reason, we are told by one entomologist, that the black worker ants that I was observing carry aware the carcass of the dead ant is that they are programmed to pile up the dead in a graveyard near the colony, but not inside of it. The fact that scent is involved does not diminish the incredible mystery of these pall-bearing pests. They honor their dead. Truly, “considering her ways” [his ways here] we “learn wisdom.”
