I’m sure all of us have walked by a dropped fruit on the ground and have seen a pile of ants warming around it. I have seen this countless times, but never when I happened to have my camera and MP-E 65 on me. Several days ago, I was lucky.
From some research on the Internet, I believe this is Tetramorium caespitum, or the standard pavement ant. They are famous for getting in fights with other colonies, though I do not believe that is what is occurring here.
Several weekends ago, my wife asked me to weed in our backyard. I obliged, but on my way to get some equipment, I noticed something very unusual in the backyard. The carpenter ant colony was releasing their queens and males.
First, I am not a myrmecologist and my knowledge of ants and carpenter ants comes from reading several books and observing them in my backyard. Therefore, some of the information below may be incorrect. If you know some of it to be false, please let me know and I will gladly correct it.
To be honest, I’m not sure if all of them were queens, all were males, or if there was a mix, but I suspect the latter. Their clearly were smaller winged ants and larger ones. I watched and photographed the phenomenon for a good hour. While in my opinion none of the shots are great on their own, altogether the tell a very interesting story.
While taking pictures last week, I came across several ants traveling along the stem of a bush. I tried to get a good shot of one crawling along the thin limbs, but I just couldn’t get a good shot. After some time, I became curious about what they were doing. When I took a closer look, I was even more puzzled.
I have some suspicions about what was going on, but the truth is I don’t really know. There were several of these “bumps” on the bush and the ants were traveling from one to the other. There were perhaps five ants in total that I saw.
I had to finish yesterday’s blog due to a FlickR outage (they host the pictures for the blog), so continuing with the story I was amazed with how many bugs were out. I picked up the lid on one of the trash cans in the back of our yard and noticed a stink bug. This is a shot after I had moved it to a leaf.
At first I was rather excited because as I prodded it to move to the leaf I smelled something curious. Had the stink bug actually fired at me? After all, it is well known that stink bugs defend themselves through a foul smelling mixture that they spray at potential attackers. I then heard my neighbor cussing that something he had opened really stunk, which culled the excitement. A closer sniff of the bug revealed that it was not the stink bug itself. Perhaps it did spray, but I couldn’t smell it.
I then moved the stink bug to a primrose that I felt was more photogenic.
It didn’t seem enthralled to be there and soon took off.
I let it go, knowing that it certainly will not be the last stink bug I photograph this year. I always enjoy photographing them due to their bright green color and interesting eyes. The next time though I think I’ll try finding a leaf that matches the color as close as possible and try some photographs on it. I’m not sure the strong colors of the flower really helped the shot in this case.
Another interesting episode came with an ant that I found crawling in one of our recycle bins. It took off when I tried to photograph it and crawled into the bin. I watched it for a bit until it came to the very edge of the recycle bin and we stared at each other for about a minute.
I’m not sure of the species. It did not appear to be a carpenter ant, but I didn’t get a good enough shot of the entire body to be able to identify it.
Finally, I did not have too much luck with the flies that day – who were a bit skittish, but I did manage to get one fly. Interestingly it was wingless – though I’m not sure why.
Why this particular fly did not have wings will have to go in my mystery bin.
Not too much too say today, so I thought I would post a few creepy crawly shots. I hope at least one of these grosses you out a bit, because otherwise I’m not doing my job. 
I took all of these about two months ago shortly before shooting a house for Nelya. She didn’t mind too much that I showed up quite dirty from my previous shoot.
OK, I have to admit that this book is not for everyone. Who should read this book? Hmmm… Well, if you’re not interested in carpenter ants, you can skip this review.
I happen to find carpenter ants quite interesting and one species of them – Camponotus Modoc, is very common around here. Therefore, when I saw Carpenter Ants Of The United States And Canada
This weekend we finally had summer! Well, at least we had one day of it. By Sunday things were chilly again and the weather forecast says it may snow later in the week. Still, it was nice getting out and photographing things and a number of insects, such as ants, became much more active. I have almost finished reading the book “Journey to the Ants”, which is fascinating and has taught me a lot about some of the behavior of ants. One thing I didn’t know was that, with a few exceptions, most ants are not active in the cold. This makes sense, but I had always figured they were up to something – just I wasn’t seeing them. Still, the carpenter ants became active in my backyard.
I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to let carpenter ant colonies thrive in our backyard, but so far they seem content to live in the rotting landscaping timbers. As I understand it takes a long time for them to do any structural damage to a house and I have not seen them near the house anyway. I decided to play my first ant “experiment” and took a carpenter ant from one part of the yard and placed it by carpenter ants in another part. I expected to see the ants not get along at all but for the most part they didn’t fight at all. The ant I moved did hide in a hole and peep out every once in awhile, but other ants from the native colony were in the same hole. Therefore my hypothesis is that the colony is larger than I thought and that all of the ants actually belong to the same colony.
While photographing the ant, I made the mistake of not correcting the aperture from some earlier shots I took of the kids. The result was I wound up with a much lower aperture than I ordinarily would have used. The effect though, is interesting and I’ll show some shots after the jump.
A few days ago something caused me to take a path I had never taken before, leading in a direction where I had never been even interested in going. Next to the cafeteria by the building where I work, there led a path around the building. One day, while debating whether I should take a walk, I decided to follow it and see where it went. Sure enough, it went around the building to the front. I walked for a bit and then decided that it was best to get back – I had a lot of work to do. However, on the way back I noticed something that I had never seen before.
Literally a few meters away from the path, I noticed a strange sign. There was no path down to the side, but not much in terms of brush preventing one from taking a look, so I decided to see what it said. What I found, sitting on the Microsoft campus in a spot where even we weren’t familiar with, was a new world that I am just beginning to explore.
