The Ant's Behaviour

How did the ants find the sugar?

The ant colonies send scout ants to search for food in various directions, often up to a range of 100 to 200 meters.(Depends on the territorial boundary  and time of the year). The scout marches steadily in less circuitous paths initially if it has memories of previous feeder locations. (Ants use visual landmarks, and a stereo-smell system to create an odor map and navigate) Periodically it will halt and look for olfactory cues. It will then take into a more circuitous random search. And as it nears the sugar and can smell it, its search ends.

How did the scout smell it?

The antennae of ants have hair-like sensilia that contain one or more sensory neurons. Most of the sensilia contain olfactory neurons. Each neuron sends a long nerve fiber through the antennal nerve that terminate in the antennal lobe of its brain. The axons from the olfactory neurons terminate  in the lobe in globular structures called glomeruli. The antennal lobe of ants is particularly large and it has around 420-430 glomeruli. (A honey bee has 160). The more the glomeruli, the more variety of odors the ant can process. This provides for the acute smell sense of ants.

How to the ants defence themselve?
Ants attack and defend themselves by biting and, in many species, by stinging, often injecting or spraying chemicals, such as formic acid in the case of formicine ants, alkaloids and piperidines in fire ants, and a variety of protein components in other ants. Bullet ants (Paraponera), located in Central and South America, are considered to have the most painful sting of any insect, although it is usually not fatal to humans. This sting is given the highest rating on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

Do Ants Sleep?

Once food is found, the scout collects a little sample of it and marches back to the colony finding the shortest route and leaving a pheromone trail behind. Once  in the colony the other ants analyse the food the scout brought and take the trail set by the scout. As more ants get on the trail, they make the marking stronger so that other ants who went out on searches can smell the trail and join them.

The queens slept about six minutes at a time, 90 times each day. The queens’ took two different types of naps. One type of nap resembled a light doze. During these dozes, the queens’ antennae remained partly raised and their mouths stayed open. A worker ant or the movement of another queen could easily awaken a queen who was merely dozing.

Some of the queen ants’ naps seemed to be much deeper. During these deeper naps, the queens’ antennae would retract and their mouths would close. Often, the queens appeared to be dreaming, exhibiting antenna movement that the researchers speculated might equate to eye movements that indicate the dream stage of sleep in mammals.

Workers slept slightly longer than minutes each nap, but took an average of 250 of these tiny naps for a total of nearly five hours of sleep per day.

This sugar detection process is not entirely intuitive and needs to be learnt. A leader scout takes a willing pupil with it to teach how to search for food. The pupil walks behind the teacher in a paired march called tandem running. The pair stops from time to time so that the pupil can commit the landmarks to its memory. When the pupil is done, it taps on its master's hind legs or abdomen two times and they start moving again. (If you see a pair stop like that, you can tap the hind legs of the master ant with a hair and it will keep moving. If the distance between the pupil and the master gets too large the master slows down while the pupil runs to catch up)