One day last fall, we were making a batch of apple wine from apples we’d harvested from our tree. We mixed the must, put in the apples, and set the buckets on the basement floor where it’s cool and out of the way. Within minutes, a column of ants was lined up to harvest the drips of sugary must that had made their way to the outside of the buckets. Just a few splashes, but those ants wasted no time in finding and exploiting them.
So how did those little critters get into the basement, and how did they find that sugary must on the outside of the bucket so quickly?
The answer, apparently, to the first question is that ants can get in through invisible cracks or spaces just about anywhere. These were the first we’d seen, so the next question was how did they find us so quickly?
Ants, it appears, have a super sense of smell. They have five times as many scent and chemical receptors on their antennae as other types of insects. They can instantly smell the sugar and make a beeline—ant line?—for it.
The ants we were seeing are carpenter ants (Camponotus pennsylvanicus). They’re about half an inch long and black. They live in colonies of 300 to 10,000 members. I hope ours are on the 300 end! The worker ants (all female) have various jobs, one of which is to go out and scout for food. They leave pheromone trails everywhere they go so they can find their way home and so their friends can find them if they have discovered food. The first ant identifies the dribble of sugary must on the side of the bucket through her amazing sense of smell. She travels there post-haste leaving a marked trail. Through chemical signaling, she sends out a message over the air waves saying she’s hit the jackpot. Her friends smell her message and start coming in an orderly line to join her and help with the harvest. They eat the sugary must until they are full. Some they eat for themselves. The rest they direct to their social stomach or crop, where it is held for transport until they can get home and feed it to the young’uns.
Hopefully, these ants live in a nest somewhere outside. Since this is our first sighting, the chances are good. They like to live in trees, dead or alive, carving out galleries which comprise their nest. That’s why they’re call carpenter ants. They don’t digest the wood like termites— They just chew it up with their fearsome mandibles and spit it out. Then they shovel it out of the nest as coarse sawdust. If trees aren’t readily available, they’ll take woodpiles, under logs, or other suitable places. Some of those “suitable” places can also be the two-by-fours that hold up my house. But hopefully they’re still outside.
I have always thought of ants as annoying moving specs, which, when they crawled on my skin, needed to be smooshed and flicked away. A close inspection of an ant, however, reveals a creature with three distinct body parts—a head with elbow-bent antennae, a thorax from which come her six legs and her wings, and an abdomen where she keeps her stomach and glands. Between the thorax and the abdomen is a thin flexible waist called a petiole. Wasps have this structure, too, from which comes the term wasp-waisted—not something I can relate to these days!
But back to our ant. She has two large mandibles which are pincer-shaped. She uses them to pick up and carry things. Superwoman that she is, she can actually carry up to 20 times her body weight.
To keep her from carrying off our bucket, we scrubbed away all traces of sugar on the outside, put a tight lid on it, and discouraged the present ants from telling their world about us. They left and haven’t been seen since. I’m sure they’ll be back if we’re not careful though.
Photo by Ryan Hodnett
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