Flying Ants!

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It's that time of the year again in South Africa when it starts getting warmer and the Spring rains start. This is when thousands of flying ants swarm out of holes in the ground, only to leave a mess of wings and bodies on the floor.

The little feast

This evening while out for the usual walk with the lovely @kiligirl, we suddenly noticed a mass of activity in the sky ahead of us. The sun had set and it was getting dark. A few Swallows were darting around, but they soon gave way to hundreds of bats.

This could only mean one thing: the flying ants were out.

I've always loved the sight, even though they are pests and always seem to be able to get in the house and fill the floors with their corpses. As a kid on our farm, I remember the local people getting very excited when this happened and they would gather as many live ants as they could and roast them on a metal plate over the fire.

I used to join in the little feast - they were delicious. When my kids were small I persuaded them to have roasted flying ants too. I like to think they weren't just trying to be polite when they said they were okay.

But I got to thinking. "What makes them all come out at exactly the same time?", I asked my usually encyclopaedic walking partner. But without an answer, I thought I'd better look into it. "So what's going on here then?". That sort of thing.

The flight of the drone

Disappointingly, flying ants aren't ants at all. That's right - they ain't ants. They're termites.

But not any old termites: they're known as " reproductive winged alates".

So it turns out that there are termite castes, including workers and soldiers. But these flying termites have an equally important role: their job is to reproduce. So what you see when they swarm out are "Flying reproductives", or drones.

They're not born for the job. They start out life as workers and then morph into the role. Some workers morph into being soldiers, but when it's time for the colony to swarm, some of the older workers "molt" into winged alates (Latin for "wing").

It's not actually known what causes them to leave at the same time. But when they do it for a very short flight - their first and last. The male and female alates form a pair, break off their wings, look for shelter, seal it off, and then mate. The female becomes the new Queen, and a new colony is formed. And the male becomes the King, and they mate for life.

Quite romantic, really.

Also posted on Weku, @tim-beck, 2018-10-17