Hi.
I've decided to combine every single time that I've learned a sad truth about ants here, from the beginning of my ant keeping to now. I didn't want to post all of these at Leo's thread so I'm posting them here. Feel free to add some stories, but you should probably add them to Leo's thread first.
I'm posting only three for now.
Tale 1: Worker ants have wings? (Ohio) (On Leo's Thread)
Back when I didn't really know about ants, I once collected some ants during a nuptial flight. I thought the males were queens and the queens were workers. I placed them all in a gel ant farm. I was really confused when the queens killed each other and the males died.
I remember that I was so amazed to think that ants have wings.
Tale 2: Those are fire ants. (Ohio)
Once in Ohio a friend told me that he found a nest of fire ants (they were really camponotus). From that point on, I was convinced that anything that didn't resemble a camponotus worker could not sting me.
That led to a chain of events:
*During vacation, I once poked a finger into a real fire ants. Boy, did that hurt.
*I once got attacked by argentine ants. At that time, I didn't know that ants could spray acid so I was pretty sure that those ants just had really strong bites.
*Two words: Velvet Ant. I can't believe that I thought that Velvet ants were actually ants.
Tale 3: Species record! (Hawaii)
Very recently, I went to Petco to buy some crickets. To my amazement, some strange ants moved into one of the cricket boxes! I was allowed to keep those ants for free.
When I got home, I did all sorts of research to figure out what these strange its were. I was almost 90% sure that I had found a native mainland fire ant colony. Sadly for me, I learned that they were actually Pharaoh ants. I never new that Pharaoh ants were actually the size of Pheidole.
I hope you enjoyed these!
