Ants!! Love 'Em or Hate 'Em

I put my husband behind the camera. He didn't know what I was going to do. Want to see how strong I am? Watch what I can do with my bare hands. In this video, I'm going to look at the ants. Do you love them or hate them? Yeah, it keeps falling apart. The ants are pretty much eating it up. The Bible says, go to the ant, thou slugger, consider her ways and be wise. Yeah, I got rid of that tree with the help of the ants. Sometimes the ants just indiscriminately take out a tree. One day we came out and this tree was just toppled over so we had to haul it to the burn pile. This is what's left of it after we burned it once and we also had another tree that was taken down by ants. This pine tree right here one day the top of it just fell off. The ants have destroyed it and the woodpeckers are poking holes in it. And occasionally branches will fall and we have to pick up the branches and put them in the burn pile. So eventually this whole tree is going to come down. The ants have killed it. There used to be a tree right here in this spot but one day the whole tree just came tumbling down and burned it up. The ants killed it. So I guess the ants are all about thinning out the forest. They do it for us. I just hope they don't knock down a tree next to our house. Ants that are eating up that stump. There are some benefits to having ants around. Ants like to eat the wood. They seem to take care of the stumps around here. Eventually the stumps just dry up and fall apart because the ants come and eat the wood. Inside and some ants. Ants take care of the stumps for us. At least the bugs around here help us to get rid of tree stumps. They just demolish it. And the chickens like to eat the bugs. I've often seen the chickens at this stump. Our chickens love to feast on the ants. We have a great ecosystem around here. We chop down the trees we don't want. The bugs and the ants they come and demolish the stumps. The chickens eat the bugs. The chickens lay eggs and we eat the eggs. It's a working system. The ants help remove unwanted stumps for us. So we don't have to labor to dig them out or hire a person with a backhoe to dig them out. I had a clothesline here, but the ants ate the bottom of my pole and so my second side fell down. Ants can be a problem. Ants sure can be awful pests as well. Yeah, there's ants right there. I had ants on me when I was standing over there. That's where she brought lavender oil. I have some in my purse. Well, I have an itch. I've got oil on my shoe. And if we accidentally leave cat food dish out, the ants attack. It's such a pain. We have to really watch the ants. Look at that. The whole trail of them. I think they live underneath my pole. Underneath my porch. Oh, I see ants everywhere, honey. It takes a lot of energy for the baby chicks to hatch. Once out of the egg, they're weak and vulnerable. They lay still and rest. A resting animal is easy prey for ants. We have lost far too many baby chicks to the ants. Sometimes nature can be so cruel. So this time, I watched more closely on hatching day. Eggs hatch on the 21st day of sitting. I removed the newly hatched chicks from the nest. I brought them into the house and placed them in a warm brooder for a few days until they were strong and lively. After three days, I returned them back to the mother hen to care for. I was a little worried she might not accept them. I didn't worry about any issue. I love watching life renew itself. Sometimes it just needs a little help to survive. Will you look at this? The ants have eaten right through a brick. I didn't know they could do that. Wow. That's pretty amazing. The entrance to their colony is in the middle of this brick. Huh. I guess they just wanted a brick entrance to their home just like me. We just had a huge rainstorm the other night and here's a cool thing that the ants do. They sort of build themselves a high wall around the entrance to their ant nest. Isn't that cool? It is fun to watch the ants. They're always so busy collecting food, building their nest and sometimes moving eggs. On this day I noticed the ants were eating a dead beetle on my front porch. I don't know if they killed it or not but he was obviously intended to be food for them. But then I saw something else. There is one just one larger ant among them. That is a soldier ant. It's very strong. Look how it pulls this great big beetle. It's probably 10 times its size. I watch it drag the beetle across my porch. I had to keep readjusting my camera because it was working so fast and moving the beetle quite far. This single ant is pulling the large beetle as well as all the other ants that are crawling all over the beetle at the same time. Incredible. Look at this. This soldier ant is throwing off some of the worker ants as if to say, get out of my way. How funny. I slowed this part down so you can see more clearly what they're doing. How fascinating. I did sit there and watch for a while but then I just set my camera to watch while I went to do other things. So they drag the beetle He is far too big to pull down into the crack. They continue to work on the beetle for many hours. Some from the top side and some from the underside. Here's a closer look. As I watch, I see lots of small ants. They're worker ants or scouts. Their job is to find food and then they leave a chemical trail to show the other ants where the food is and they all pitch in to do their part collecting the food for their colony. They work as a unified team. The worker ants are sterilized females. Their main job is to find food and bring it back to their colony. They work for the queen ant. The queen ant's job is to produce eggs. When the eggs hatch the ants fly out of the nest pairing up with the male. I have seen this firsthand but I did not have my camera at the time to catch it. The queens will go and start her own new colony. Then they drop their wings. The queen can live up to 8 years and she lays hundreds of eggs per day. No wonder I have so many ants on my property. The worker ants take care of the eggs also. The male ants only have one job to do and that is mating to propagate the ant colony. Once the males do their job they die shortly after mating. So, as I am looking at these busy little ants and considering her ways I have come to the conclusion that this is a female dominated world where the females do most of the important work. Without males in the way no wonder they can get so much done. I slowed this part down so you can see more clearly what they are doing. I will speed up parts of their work. There is so much busy activity happening. Certainly ants are never idle. They work so fast it is kind of hard to see what they are actually doing. I wonder do the ants work all night? Do ants ever sleep? Or do they just take shifts? Perhaps one group works while the other rests. I don't know because I can't really identify one ant from the other other than the workers and the soldiers because of size. But they are certainly fascinating to watch. The next morning I could then see what they had done. They decapitated the beetle. They took his head off. Then the ants literally ate the guts out of the beetle's body. They also ate the contents from the head. As you know beetles have a hard exoskeleton that protects their inner soft body parts. The next morning the beetle was nearly an empty shell. Whenever we have a chicken die the ants immediately go to work on it. They first go into the eye because that is a soft place. The ants this time literally eat old flesh off the chicken right down to the bones. You just see bones and feathers left. I recorded it one time but deleted that footage because I don't think anyone would be interested in seeing that gross sight. They will take care of the dead. This isn't an ant but I wanted to include it anyhow. Get up close a bit. I'm close enough. Once she thinks it's safe she will check on her babies then come up and take the food down. It is a wasp. Eggs, babies, whatever. That's her nest. There's a hole right here. She went down on the hole. Her nest. Now she's taking the cat... Oh wow, she did that fast. Let's see that again but a little bit slower. She checks on her babies then she backs out to bring home dinner.