ANTS!

The female insects have strings to inject venom to their enemy where the string is their modified ovipositor. Most insects in this order have a waist that separates the thorax and abdomen. On their head they have two large compound eyes and mandibulate mouthparts. Their antenna is medium in length and usually strongly elbowed.

Most larvae in this order are maggot-like and with no legs. However, the Sawflies larvae look like caterpillars and sometimes mistaken as butterflies or moths larvae. The insects in this order developed in complete metamorphosis.

One interesting thing I remember reading about ants is that they have no sense of direction. They only find their way back to their nest/hill by following the pheromone trails of other ants, and every trail only branches into a 60-degree Y at any given point. That way every ant can always get back home no matter where on the trail network it is.

Despite their fascinating biology, however, I hate fire ants.

these things are awesome!

(I, for one, would welcome both.)

http://www.setel.com/~ccprek/pics/moon_photos/Baeus.jpg

http://www.setel.com/~ccprek/pics/moon_photos/Meloidae.jpg

ihttp://www.setel.com/~ccprek/pics/moon_photos/ours2.jpg

http://www.antlionpit.com/

I used to do this, but my mum went mad and poured boiling water on them to protect her garden.

Even though ants kill all garden pests.

Ha ha, that's great. Now I know where to go to get the answers I need.

twice a day I have to spray down my desk to get rid of their carcasses. the other day one crawled on my mouse hand!

i'm going to go postal on their segmented bodies. . .

RIP Roy Snelling, ant guy:

For all their abundance, and our proximity to them, "we know very little about the ant," Snelling said in a 1965 Times article. "Scientists have been studying ants for only 100 years."

So Snelling traveled the world looking under rocks, setting out chicken scraps as bait and sometimes climbing to the tops of mountains while searching for ant colonies. His studies are the primary reference for the honeypot ants of North America, groups of carpenter ants and the ant life of Chile.

In 1965, when he was 30 and one of only 10 myrmecologists in the world, Snelling followed a hunch and for two years searched for a colony of Nobomessor cockerellis. The shiny, black, slender, termite-eating ant had not been seen in California before. Snelling found the colony on a desert peak 50 miles southwest of Needles and observed it for 44 hours.

Lying on his stomach watching and sometimes listening -- a few species make noises by snapping their jaws or rubbing their legs together -- Snelling understood the lives of ants: how they relate to one another, how they interact with the environment, their social order.

"Big, healthy ants are always females," he told The Times in 1965. "Straggly, miserable-looking ants are always males. It's strictly a female's world. . . . When the act of mating is completed, in a matter of seconds the male drops dead." A queen ant can live as long as 15 years.

www.supersmurf.com

Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics

DALLAS (AP) - In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.
The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy rasberry ants"—crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

"They're itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they're just running everywhere," said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. "There's just thousands and thousands of them. If you've seen a car racing, that's how they are. They're going fast, fast, fast. They're crazy."

The ants—formally known as "paratrenicha species near pubens"—have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.

"At this point, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed," said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist.

The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.

But the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.

Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants—which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season—appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

"The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good," said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It's not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

At the same time, the ants aren't taking the bait usually left out in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen restrictions on the use of more powerful pesticides.

And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.

"It looked like someone had come along and poured coffee granules all around the perimeter of the rooms," said Lisa Calhoun, who paid exterminators $1,200 to treat an infestation of her parents' home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A&M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.

"This one seems to be like lava flowing and filling an entire area, getting bigger and bigger," said Ron Harrison, director of training for the big pest-control company Orkin Inc.

And all this time I thought it was the bees that would cripple Houston.

how to kill ants? i don't want to leave out anything poisonous that a cat could eat/lick.

Just train the cat to eat them.

apart from the usual fun i've been having killing the occasional line of ants intruding my house when i forget to put a sweet wrapper in the bin, I'm completely bemused by a BBC article today on scientific findings reports that OMG we just realised ants work together !

and had to laugh at this..
Ants and bees worked together as a single unit, and were prepared to die for the greater good of the colony.

The study's findings appear to echo the insect worlds portrayed in the animated films Antz and Bee Movie, in which the characters live in rigidly conformist societies.

HAHA yes Antz writers were privvy to ant behaviour knowledge that scientists somehow have only just discovered.

Can someone tell the carpenter ants in my bathroom that there is no food to be had there?

I'm tired of dousing the floor corner with tea tree oil every other morning. (but man, do they hate that tee tree oil)

tiny ants are colonizing my bathroom just in the last 48 hours. arghhhh

Well, it is spring for most of us, and ants are kinda amazing in knowing to emerge right when spring starts pretty much.

unless you leave sugary wet things on the floor often, then hello ant season year round.

BBC: Ant mega-colony takes over world!!

But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.

so much ant-thropomorphisizing in that article

wut
http://lostinexile.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/marching-ants.jpg

I wonder if he also fell asleep, like Miss Starry

wanna ask him if those are supposed to be ticks

anybody know a good ant deterrent that isn't harmful to cats? I keep coming home to tons of them in my poor dude's bowl after I put out the wet food in the morning!

i had this prob once and ended up putting the bowl on a saucer filled with water until they went away.

will try that - thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyBf3GcGX64

these little motherfuckers

they're resilient bastards, I'll give em that much

well, i seem to have an ongoing ant problem and it's starting to make me think that my home is ground zero for some intergalactic event that made these ants super organized
they don't want to eat the terro anymore and the traps don't seem to be doing anything
they'll go away for a day and then poof, there they are again scooting around again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTv4WYHsncQ

Fuckers invaded my car a few weeks ago 😠

I enjoyed the Ant-Man movie but I kinda resented how it tried to make the ants cute THEY ARE NOT CUTE

Timely bump - today in the UK was Flying Ant Day! I was playing cricket amidst them. How lovely they were, simmering the air hazy on little parachute wing! A few of the pale sycamore-seed ballerinas turned out to be mating pairs, the smaller male facing the other way, joined at the rear into a strange helicopter! Why, one such aerial love-scene alighted upon my cricket-shirt as I prowled the field. It made me feel Earth's Champion, the bower of fertility upon which Joy is written. I adore this day! I adore Ant!

yeah, not aware of this i left my window wide open and well i guess my bedroom belongs to the ants now i am proud to be their guest

> today in the UK was Flying Ant Day

there's not just one day, it's a very local thing - W12 had them a couple of weeks ago. i saw a few on friday night walking home but they were mostly wingless and not in anywhere near the numbers of the first batch.

it always seems to be on a hot day after a rain shower.

(as for getting rid of them, don't expect them to walk into traps. instead, a squirt of ant powder on an established trail, as close as possible to where it comes in, and they'll disappear overnight - they tread the poison back to the nest and it wipes them out)

Amendment: yesterday in Orpington was Flying Ant Day.

Today I am in the South of France, presque à Valbonne. Perhaps Flying Ant Day impends ici. Perhaps the ants here are somehow yet more dazzling in their descent.

They are definitely outnumbering the humans (and even the dead ones) in my area tonight. I was walking through the graveyard earlier had one of them moments when you notice a few flying ants and then realise they are absolutely bloody everywhere. Not just flying but teeming all over the pave stones as well.