Like Ants to Honey

Over my time in South Sudan I think ants and I have reached a point of mutual respect and appreciation.  Ants are not like mice.  Set a few mousetraps, and the collective will of the mice population is broken.  Set a few ant traps and your house will be flooded with more ants than could ever be killed by those traps.  Knock some termites off a tree and ants one quarter their size will swarm and carry them away.  They are impressively organized and are a formidable foe.

Interesting Fact:  The estimated weight of all ants on the planet is 900 to 9,000 million tonnes.  The estimated weight of all humans is 335 million tonnes. 

Last week I noticed an increasing level of ant activity on the set of shelves where most of our food is kept.  After a day or two of randomly squishing ants, and of spraying the base of our shelf with bug killer, I decided to see if I could get to the root of the problem.  My investigation yielded a container of icing sugar, left open and swarming with ants.  I moved the icing sugar to the counter, banged off all ants that were crawling on the container, and sealed it up to be sifted at a later date - it remains on our counter.

A few days later my removal of the sugar hadn’t produced a noticeable reduction in ant population, so back to the shelf I went, looking for ant bait number two.  This time I identified a bottle of honey, also with a loose lid.  Honey is stickier than icing sugar.  As a result, the honey container had accumulated a layer of ants approaching one centimeter in thickness, drowned or drowning in the sticky mess.  What a way to go…

I got out a new container and our little sieve, poured the honey through it, sealed up the container and put it back on the shelf.  Problem solved, but not the end of the story.  Left on our kitchen table was a sieve full of ants glistening with fresh local honey.  They looked delicious.  After some moments of hesitation, I could resist no longer.  A took a pinch of ants and honey and dropped it into my mouth.

Soda bottle (original container), strained honey, delicious ants

An alternative explanation for my snack:  In traditional Maori culture (I'm half Kiwi, not at all Maori, though I do have Maori aunt and cousins), after a battle, warriors would eat the heart of one of their slain enemies.  It was an intimidation tactic and I imagine it worked pretty well.  Ants are really small so I didn’t think it was practical to locate an individual heart.  I figure I must have consumed at least 15 hearts.  Let this be a warning to all ants.  (any biologists out there are free to identify what organ an ant might have that resembles a heart)

What do ants taste like? Well these ones tasted remarkably sour.  I even took the time to get one or two in between my teeth and crunch into them to confirm that the source of the distinct flavour was the ants themselves.  This surprised me and has me pondering between two possible explanations: 

1.      1. The honey in the bottle has quite a citrus flavor.  It is possible that the ants, in eating a lot of honey, were able to somehow concentrate that flavor within their bodies.

2.       2. Awhile ago, when I was chatting about eating ants with my good friend Bear Grylls, he explained to me that ants can contain high levels of formic acid, which is actually poisonous.  Maybe formic acid is sour tasting?  Either way, this discussion was helpful as it reduced my temptation to go back and finish off the remaining ants in the sieve.