Sometimes mistakes have interesting effects
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.