This is the first Word of the Week under a Labour government and it’s fitting perhaps that the new regime coincides with a sudden proliferation of ants in my life. (Hands up if you thought that was going to say ‘pants’.)
Ants are, in many ways, the epitome of socialism, though some commentators beg to differ. A monarchy lording it over downtrodden workers? Hardly what Karl Marx had in mind. But look closer, as I have been this week, and you’ll see that this simplistic description of ant society is far from the truth.
Last weekend I found a nest of ants on my front doorstep, threatening to invade the house, so I swept them up and carried them to a different part of the garden where I thought they could begin a new life. I must have inadvertently carried the queen indoors, because the next day I had what the kids might call a gathering but I would describe as a full blown formic party going on around a corner of the skirting board in the hall.
The first thing I noticed was that the ants weren’t slaving away constantly, as the stereotype would have us believe. Most of them were standing around in a big circle, presumably discussing the minimal role of males in a smoothly functioning social system, or listening to a lecture on cheese. On further investigation I learnt that they do, in fact, get plenty of rest; far more than us. Half of the workers are inactive at any one time.
And when you study their ‘work’, it amounts to little more than walking about. They’re clever enough to make it look industrious by following one another in straight lines, and every now and then they might lend each other a hand to shift a leaf or carry a breadcrumb back to the nest, but generally speaking it’s a walk in the park. Literally. Show me an ant that doesn’t love a picnic! And hats off to them for that. We could all learn from that sort of work-life balance.
We think homo sapiens has been a successful species but ants knock us into a cocked hat. They’ve been around 400 times as long as we have and they continue to thrive just about everywhere on Earth, apart from the ice caps, which seems pretty sensible to me. It is, perhaps, a shining example of what can be achieved in a society run by females. Male ants serve but one purpose: to mate. They don’t hang around for more than a couple of weeks. They are born, they procreate, and they die. Fill in your own punch line here, ladies…
Nonetheless, I don’t think a crowd of ants in your hallway is a good look, so I swept them up again, deposited them a bit further down the garden, and looked up humane methods for keeping ants out of the house. You need to disrupt their scent trails, it says here, so in accordance with the advice I laid a cinnamon stick, some coffee, chili, paprika, cloves and mint leaves near the area and sprinkled some vodka, gin and lemon juice on the tiles. Half an hour later they were all back, using the ingredients to make cocktails!
So now I have a colony of Champagne socialists in the house. And you know what? Now that the sun’s shining at last, I think I might just join them.
