My new video is just about a worker cleaning her queen. She was doing this for about 40min. They spend so much time cleaning themselves and each other I wonder if they remove mites in this process? Has anyone ever seen one ant pull a mite off of another? I suspect some mites may be chemically invisible to ants... but given their cleaning habit it's remarkable that mite are so common in the wild. Did you know that 20 percent of mite species are exclusive to ants? (some of these are beneficial or neutral mites, they aren't all the "bad" kind)
Also, it looks like she REALLY enjoys this!
