Ants Marching

OK so the title tonight is a blatant plug for one of my favourite Dave Matthews Band songs (link below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdidovCPhVM

On with the blog. I am really not an entomologist. That said Kenya is a fantastic place for anybody with a keen interest in the study of insects. Yesterday while I was doing the rounds of the lower school classrooms I was surprised to see the Year 2 pupils and their teacher running out of the classroom in a panic and making a lot of noise. The commotion was caused by a single wasp which was doing the wasp thing of terrorizing people in confined spaces by dive bombing them. I rushed into the classroom, armed myself with a text book and tried swatting it. I managed to kill it eventually but only after it had stung me. The class teacher, Madam Rose then pointed to the small wasp nest outside the window of her classroom which half a dozen of the deceased wasp’s brothers and sisters were buzzing around. I’d managed to brush the wasp off before it could get round to delivering a proper sting but I was still glad of the tube of anti-histamine I keep for such occasions.

The ants connection is inspired by my latest labour saving idea. As I am currently living on my own in the house and eating a lot of my meals with the children in our dining hall it really makes sense to do my washing up once a day. This arrangement saves gas and water. I’ve noticed that a colony of very small ants find the plates and cutlery that I leave stacked by the sink ready for washing very attractive as a source of food. They are very methodical as they go over the items in carefully regimented lines. They confine themselves to the sink area. I’m not really sure where they come and go from so I guess there is a danger that I could be harbouring a huge colony of these tiny creatures somewhere in the house. My guess is that they make their way in through a tiny gap in the window frame and are really outdoor ants. I haven’t put my theory fully to the test yet but I’m sure that the ants do quite an effective job of cleaning the worst bits of meal remains off the plates and cutlery. It’s fascinating watching them. They are, unfortunately, so small that it’s impossible to brush all of them off the washing up when I put it into the bowl so there is a bit of an attrition rate involved in their scavenging. I wonder if ants have any sense of legal redress for killing fairly large numbers of them over a period of time. If they did they would probably refer to my crime as anticide.