Day 28 - Asian Weaver Ants

Bangalore diaries continue.

So many little events took place in the non-human world, probably unnoticed by many.

Asian weaver ants - Oecophylla smaragdina - crawling all over this fat caterpillar was one such  event. These carnivorous critters, are quick to swarm a hapless and slow moving caterpillar, spray it with formic acid, and hen go about moving it to their nest, where they will slowly and methodically feed on it, is what I read.

I stared in fascination and tried to figure how many ants there were.  I reached a 100, and then gave up counting.  

All orange/ brown worker ants.  The queen with the emerald bottom would have been in the nests high up in the tree.

The queen was probably up here among the mango leaves, in one of the several nests.  I always thought each nest was a different colony, turns out that is not the case, but all these nests are part of one large colony!

These are just different rooms, with different activities - one for the babies, one for the food, one for the insects that they tap for the honeydew that they feed on.  And that one brilliant emerald-butt queen controls all of this.  From what I read - she is 4x the size of these worker ants...must be quite an imposing presence - I wonder if I will ever see one, seeing how she will be inside her nest castle all her life.

Here's my Slow Mo video of the ants and the caterpillar.

And here is a peek inside a weaver ant colony - Weaver Ants | The queens, the princesses, the drones and the workers