Ants and Time

So I was lying on a lounge chair in by the pool (backwards.  I don’t know how people can pronate with their torsos bent at such an angle.  I bend my knees up anyway, so it makes sense to lie with my head at the foot if I’m not reclining.)  and reading about the various constructs of time on the path to having a universally agreed upon time (Like, that the minutes on every clock on earth (excepting part of India, I think) are always the same) out of my pretty new kern book with my pencil resting in the crack between pages when a bug flies onto my page.  Upon closer inspection, it is an ant.  With wings.

Now, to put this in context, last Thursday, Walter Tschinkel, a myrmecologist (ant guy), was on the show.  And I kind of wrote a lot of the script.  Ants are on my mind.  So this ant was sitting there, and it started writhing.  I was like, gracious, maybe its wings got caught under my pencil, and I picked it up.  Sure enough, there were two wings lying there.  As I watched, the queen gnawed off her other two wings and set off on a curvaceous path around my page before abandoning it for the patio.  

I know she will die.  Regardless of what kind of ant she is, there are no crevices in our newly finished and massive patio.  I don’t know if she can make it the ten meters to the fence, and further to the dirt to lay her eggs.  

But she was so tiny.  I looked around and saw about twenty other ants doing the same thing.  It must be some wild and crazy breeding day.  Unless these ants are so different from fire ants that this was some completely different process that I don’t even understand.  Nevertheless, it was really amazing to get a glimpse of nature happening – not on the Discovery channel, not in a textbook, but on my extracurricular reading by the pool.