Chewing off her wings – the queen ant’s rite of passage
By Rebecca Nesbit from the Society of Biology There has been a long, slow build up to flying ant day this year. The first sightings of winged black garden ants came early, with hundreds of records for the flying ant survey already in by the third week of July. The first major flying ant day, however, was Friday 26th July, though even this turned out to be a prelude to the mass emergence on Thursday 1st August. For me, this protracted spell of flying ant sightings has been an opportunity to witness some fascinating behaviour as part of one of the summer’s greatest spectacles. On 26th July, I was excited to find some flying ants on the outside of the Society of Biology office. The tiny males were in search of fat new queens to mate with – I even saw two males trying simultaneously to mate with one queen. The next stage of…