It's never the ants you're observing who sting you

It seems to be the time of year to be stung by ants. A lot of people I know have gotten stung this week. I got stung this morning while looking for bees, probably by one of the red harvesters that are ubiquitous where I live.

Meanwhile in the hills, I've noticed quite a variety of ants in the evenings. I've been trying to make a point of taking pictures of some of them, even though I'm not great at identifying ants. I've been out most weekday evenings the past couple weeks, saying goodbye to the land around here. If you asked me a few years ago whether I'd miss SoCal when I left, I'd have told you no, but I will. I'm going to miss scented nights under the Milky Way, shimmering with the chorus of so many different kinds of insects singing together. I'm going to miss the dizzying diversity of insects in the scrub, the way it seems like everywhere I look there's a different kind of ant. Huge red ants, little black ants, tiny yellow ants you can barely even see if you don't put your face right up into their trails. Ants with short legs and ants that seem to be all leg. Sugar ants keeping watch over clusters of aphids and scale insects, fire ants going to the carcass of some small mammal, harvester ants dragging seeds several times their own size. I'm told the forests up north don't have anything like such a diversity of ants. (I'm also told I can expect to get bitten by angry Pogonomyrmex a lot less, which I will probably appreciate.)

Posted on June 29, 2022 05:54 AM by wildnettle