There are a lot of ants in our forest, but one anthill is particularly tall, bigger than my six-year-old granddaughter Sasha.
Walking in the woods, we go to him to observe the life of ants. A quiet, even rustle comes from the anthill on a nice day. Hundreds of thousands of insects are digging on the surface of its dome, dragging twigs somewhere, plugging and corking out their numerous moves, pulling out the white larvae testicles to warm up in the sun.
Sasha tears off the bylinka and sticks it into an anthill. Immediately she is attacked by disgruntled, irritated ants. They push out the byline and, having bent, shoot it with caustic acid. If you lick the butterfly after that, the lips are still smelling like citric acid, which tastes like citric acid.
Dozens of narrow paths run away from the ant's city. The continuous flow of ants runs businesslike through them in the high grass ants. One of the trails has led us to the very bank of our river. There, a small tree grew over the cliff. Its branches and leaves were covered with ants.
We examined the tree carefully. There were a lot of greenish aphids on it, dense masses of fixed sitting on the underside of the leaves and at the base of the cuttings. Ants tickled the aphids with their mustaches and drank the sweet juice they released. It was a "dairy" herd of ants.
It is known how diverse the species of ants are. Large redheaded forest ants are very different from the small black sweet tooth ants that often climb into the sugar bowl in our forest house. Scientists count thousands of species of ants on the ground. They all live in numerous societies. The largest of them are three centimeters in size.
Upon returning home, Sasha asks him to read about ants in books. We learn about the amazing African tailor ants that build their nests from leaves glued to the edges of a special sticky substance produced by ants' larvae, about stray hunting ants, nomadic armies of millions of people, consisting of miners, workers' ants and soldiers' ants. We learn that there are enslaving ants that enslave other ants, there are shepherds that grow aphids in their nests, there are agricultural ants...
Some of the ants living in hot countries sometimes do harm by cutting trees.
Our forest ants are very useful. They loosen up the soil, destroy forest pests and do a lot of sanitary work, removing the remains of dead animals and birds.
There are no people who have not seen ants. But in their complex social life, it is far from certain. Myrmecologists, who study ants, still do not know how ants are conspiring with each other, smoothly dragging heavy, many times greater than their own weight, objects, as they manage to maintain a constant temperature inside the anthill. Many secrets have not yet been revealed in the life of the ant colonies.
A long time ago, when my father first began to take me on a hunting trip, there was such a rare case. We drove through the woods on yeast. It was early in the morning, on trees and grass, sparkling dew. It smelled like mushrooms, pine needles.
My father stopped a horse at the big tree.
- Look at this," he said, pointing to a huge heap of ants overgrown with fern. - There's "ant oil" lying there.
Almost at the top of the pile was a small piece of some light yellow substance, very similar to ordinary butter. We got off the yeast and started looking at the mysterious substance that ants were running on. The surface of the "oil" was matte from many traces of ants.
My father told me that he had to find such "ant oil" on ants, but rarely anyone could see it.
We put a piece of "oil" in a mug that we took with us on a hunting trip, tied it with paper and hid it under a tree. On the way back, we were going to take the ant oil.
In the evening we were coming back from the hunt. My father took out a mug from under the tree and took off the paper. There wasn't much "oil" left in the mug, it was gone.
We brought home the rest of the "ant oil". In a warm room, it melted, became liquid and transparent. It smelled like ants.
Our grandmother, who lived with us, rubbed her lower back with this "oil" and assured her that the forest medicine was very helpful from the "slug" that tortured her.
For all my life I did not have to find a mysterious "ant oil". I asked experienced people and familiar zoologists, looked into books, but the "ant oil", which I saw as a child, and remained a mystery.
