Yesterday, while walking the wilds very near my house, I found a
huge, very active red anthill I did not know existed. This pleased me. As I have said previously in this blog, I am fascinated
by red ants. I have forgiven them for
that time in my childhood when one of them bit my most tender part.
The anthill I found is somewhat tucked under the arms of a
sprawling juniper. The ants from this colony
have swept clean all small bits from a fifteen-foot radius around the
pile. Every loose speck, every grain of
sand, every scale dropped from the juniper has been gathered-up from the ground
and carried back to make a dense hill two-foot high and nearly twice that
distance across.
Red ants teemed atop the hill in the warming midday sun.
How many ants to build that pile?
How many ant-hours for work for the same? How old is the colony?
Consider, ants can lift ten to fifty time their body weight. If they were the size of humans, we might regularly
see them picking up and carrying small cars from place to place. They might regularly drag-off to their colony
any hapless free-ranging cattle they encountered.
I stood watching the ants atop the hill until the thought of one
finding its way up inside my pant leg occurred.
Lesson learned, there.
—Mitchell Hegman
I encountered my first red ant hill in North Dakota at the age of 4. I didn't know what it was and I stepped right on it as it looked like a pile of gravel/sand. I can still vividly remember looking down in confusion at the fury of glossy red ants that boiled out and immediately began biting. My dad had the wherewithal to act when I started screaming and yanked me away but I was covered in bruises for weeks from the intensity of the bites. A hard lesson to learn and to this day I give those hills (which are architectural wonders, honestly) a wide berth.
ReplyDeleteMost everyone I know has had some kind of encounter with an anthill. They really are wonders. But keep your distance!
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