Flying ants everywhere for a while....

 

South Coast, bit of a swarm of flying ants at around 7pm, mating all over
the place, first ones I've seen this year. Stayed around for about an hour
and then disappeared, gone somewhere far away I hope.

Same problem in London, apparently:

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/835511-flying-ants-plague-london

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/19/flying-ants-twitter

 

On Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:39:23 +0100, Mentalguy2k8 wrote:


Not here, ah probably because we don't have any ants...   B-)


I think the males will have died after finding queen. The queens
after mating will have flown to the ground, shed their wings and
crawled away to start a new nest. I doubt they travel all that far.


Have they worked out how ants synchronise this mating flight across
so many nest and huge areas?

--
Cheers
Dave.

 

says...

     Not here;-) I have a big colony of ants living in a dalek plastic
compost bin; obviously it's too dry but amazingly, they do a terrific
job of converting the contents to a fine brown humus. The bonus is a big
harvest of ants eggs on the top surface, which I take  to feed my
goldfish.
     The other day I opened the lid to fetch some ant eggs
 and there were about 2 million flying ants inside, ready
 for take-off.Rammed it back on quick. They don't have another exit and
today they're all dead.

    Janet.

 


All my fault.  We picked up a paving slab on the allotment yesterday and
there were approx 85 trillion of them came out.  Sorry.  Should have dropped
it back in place sooner!

 



I recall this happening about this time of year when I was a kid about fifty
years ago in eastern Canada.  I used to call it "Ant Day".  All the large
fat females would drop to earth, shed their wings and go off and found new
colonies.  As you say, thankfully they disappear shortly afterwards.

someone