Many years have passed since the time when I happily spent my leisure time fussing with insects. I was still in school then, and the long summer vacations let me devote a fair amount of time to this curious occupation exactly when nature has a real full house in the macro-world. Who did we not catch back then? Fat, rather foolish bumblebees with upside-down jars, ground beetles shining with chitin and naively hiding under driftwood and stones, big-eyed lazy flies that did not expect a leash on their leg. Soldier beetles traveled across my palms, actually Cantharis rustica, along with all sorts of grasshoppers, and once there was even a hefty locust.
And this week I caught a glimpse of an ant farm in a movie. My eyes flared up in the half-dark of night with the devilish fire of desire, and of course I immediately went to Google on reconnaissance. I cannot say that a serious choice was waiting for me: almost everything I found consisted of works by local tinkerers made from gypsum and alabaster, and therefore looked homemade enough that I did not want to repeat their feat personally, at least not right now.
Against that background, a line of factory-made formicariums with a special gel filler stood out strongly. For the ants, this gel was supposed to serve as food, water, and even a roof over their heads: nothing more or less than gingerbread houses in a marmalade country. Besides all that, the gel is almost transparent and soft enough to let the ants decide the layout of their apartments on their own. On the other hand, you cannot settle a colony in such a farm: after all, the gel is not suitable for raising larvae, so why destroy them.
I was still deep in thought about the formicarium when the day before yesterday I was leaving the checkpoint at work. As usual, I came down from the porch and, in the most literal way, was stunned. It was simply impossible to walk normally along the sidewalk without jumping from side to side, breaking stride, and in other ways avoiding the chance of stepping on a young winged queen who had found herself so dangerously on the asphalt. It was a nuptial flight, the time for thousands upon thousands of hereditary princesses to try their luck in founding a new colony of Lasius niger. There were a devilish lot of them, and even more dead ones. That was when I thought: so how am I any worse?
I bought a formicarium and went hunting: I caught about ten worker Lasius ants. For forty minutes I led them across the asphalt desert until I brought them to the promised land, the gel formicarium on my desk. Unfortunately, I was not careful enough, so I accidentally injured one little ant. Forgive me, little brother. The others almost immediately huddled together, whispering with their antennae. After a many-hour meeting, sometimes interrupted by a perimeter walk around the new territory, palpating the ventilation slots and the wounded comrade, the board decided to dig. To my surprise, they did not choose the holes I had marked out in the gel, but selected the very corner of the formicarium adjacent to the glass.
At the moment, the work has already been going on for the second hour, and my people can boast of a whole centimeter-long tunnel.