In the underground nest, honey ants hang upside down from the top of the semicircular nest with their heads down and their feet up, and the huge "honey storage tanks" are filled with nectar collected by other worker ants in the colony.
In the 1970s, biologist John Conway was also a biology graduate student at the University of Colorado. The instructor told him that some honey ants were needed in order to exchange with ant experts from other countries. John Conway had seen a photograph of an ant called a "honey ant" before, and knew that in indigenous cultures the ant was considered a deity, but he knew nothing about honey ants. So he set out to study honey ants.
John Conway soon learned that honey ants can store nectar like bees (in fact, both ants and bees belong to hymenoptera), and unlike bees, honey ants store honey in their bodies. In the underground nest, honey ants hang upside down from the top of the semicircular nest with their heads down and their feet up, filling their bodies with nectar collected by other worker ants in the colony. The organ that honey ants use as collectors or honeypots is actually a digestive organ, part of the foregut, that can rapidly expand into a large ball.
The digestive organs of other ants are wrapped in a layer of exoskeleton lamination, making it impossible to expand at will, while the honey ant's stomach can expand to the size of a grape, which indicates that the honey ant's digestive organs have relatively few exoskeleton laminations wrapped around the outside. When food is scarce, honey ants can regurgitate nectar to other honey ants in the colony. Food is especially important for organisms living in arid environments.
Two species of honey ants
There are at least 6 species of honey ants in the world. John Conway was primarily interested in north American honey ant M. Mexicanus and Australian Honey Ant C. inflatus conducts research. According to historical records, the indigenous people of North America had the custom of eating honey ants. It is said that after the Aztecs dug out the honey ants, they directly used their teeth to bite the honey ants to fill the nectar-filled abdomen. They also spread honey from honey ants on food to treat diseases, and also used honey ants to make alcoholic beverages.
After comparing Australian honey ants with North American honey ants, John Conway found that the two honey ants were very similar in many ways: they were very large; they accounted for more than 1/5 of the entire nest population; and they were usually developed by young worker ants that had just hatched for two weeks. This last point often gives the illusion that only young worker ants can take on this role, because their exoskeletons are not yet fully developed, the softness is very good, and in fact, mature worker ants can also be transformed into honey ants. Experiments have found that after the honey ants are removed, the largest worker ants in the colony will immediately transform into honey ants.
Whether it is Australian honey ants or North American honey ants, when the body is completely enlarged, they will be "confined" in the nest for life because they cannot pass through the narrow nest passage. If they are driven out of the nest, they will immediately burst, or "six" feet lying on the ground and die.
Honey ants have a dark amber color or almost transparent body color, which indicates that the composition of honey in their bodies is quite different. In general, the honey of the dark amber honey ant is rich in glucose, fructose and trace amounts of sucrose, while the honey of the transparent honey ant is less concentrated, and its composition is mainly sugar and water.
North American honey ants feed on dead insects and other arthropods in their territories, and occasionally attack small insects to feed their larvae. Australian honey ants, on the other hand, often pick up insect larvae from the leaves of a tree called multiga to feed their larvae.
Nests and food sources
North American honey ants often nest on the highest parts of ridges and terraces, while Australian honey ants prefer to nest on lower elevations. Trees provide honey ants with abundant food resources such as nectar and insects, and also provide them with shelter from high temperatures. But there's a strange phenomenon that has puzzled John Conway: Why do Australian honey ants like to congregate on the leaves of the multia tree but not on other trees? He speculated that perhaps it was because the blades had never been disturbed. Many plants have honey glands that attract ants by secreting honey. In return, ants protect plants from attacks by herbivorous insects and other animals.
The structure of the entrance and exit of the nest of the North American honey ant and the Australian honey ant is very different. The entrance and exit of the former's lair is usually located in a pit with a circular shape and looks like a miniature volcano;
Most of the nests of the latter do not have such "volcanic vertebrae", but instead have entrances and exits built under the canopy of acacia trees, covered with dense thatch. Australian honey ants have population sizes between 1,000 and 4,000, while North American honey ants have slightly larger colonies, with about 5,000 members per population. The nests of australian honey ants extend horizontally and are usually more than two meters long; the nests of North American honey ants are less than one meter long. The nest chambers of the Australian honey ant are scattered over a large area and radiate out from several vertical channels; the nest of the North American honey ant has only one channel. The top of the nest chamber of both species of honey ants is arched to facilitate the upside down of the honey ant. The nest chamber is at least 20 cm above the surface, providing both protection and maintaining a certain temperature and humidity.
The nectar source of the North American honey ant is more extensive and complex, and any plant that can produce nectar is in its diet; the Australian honey ant feeds mainly on the honey secreted by the multiga tree and the lep honey (a red sugar flake made by the sap-sucking wood lice).
Compared to some of the ferocious members of the ant world, both the North American honey ants and the Australian honey ants seem to lack that kind of imposing vigor. John Conway once did an experiment in which he placed a little honey at the entrance of the honey ant's nest, and as a result, other types of ants beat the Australian honey ants that came out to feed and drove them back into the hole. Researchers once saw a two-color ant called Conomyrma in Arizona fence the nest of honey ants and then throw stones into the hole in order to prevent the honey ants from coming out to feed. North American honey ants feed on termites, and the feeding grounds between different ant colonies often overlap and intersect, and the two sides will inevitably go to great lengths. However, the result of "war" is often "warm swallowing" – they mainly show their strength to each other by gathering ant colonies and displaying various threatening postures, or by using non-lethal contact such as pushing each other and sending threatening signals to each other. If one side appears stronger, the "war" will soon come to an end, and the losing side will be robbed and become the slave of the victors.
Women digging nests
John Conway found that there are at least three species of honey ants living in central Australia, of which the black honey ants have the most rounded and largest beetles and are most favored by local Indigenous people.
They have the custom of digging honey ant nests and feeding honey ants. The search and excavation of nests is usually undertaken by women in the tribe, who are very familiar with the social hierarchy and life patterns of honey ants. However, their understanding of honey ants does not seem to be complete and accurate. For example, they know that honey ants regurgitate honey to juvenile worker ants, but they believe that worker ants will bite through the honey ant's belly when they are hungry. For example, they believe that some worker ants will run away from home and create their own independent kingdom when they reach adulthood, but they do not know that only queen ants can lay eggs. They understandably misconceptions because queens and large adult worker ants look so similar that it's hard to tell if they're real or fake. This can also be used to explain why they never cared about the fact that digging up honey nests would lead to the depletion of honey sources.
Using digging sticks, shovels and wooden plates, the women swept through the grass in the forest and carefully searched for the holes of honey ants. Once they found the entrance to the cave, they would insert a small wooden stick into the opening of the cave for a while, and then begin to clear the ground around them. In order to avoid collapsing the nest and crushing the honey ants hanging upside down inside, they often carefully dig a small pit next to the nest, then carefully inspect the excavated nest, and scrape the soil inside with a digging stick to expose the nest. Finally, they pluck the honey ants with young branches or directly with their fingers.
When the number of honey ants in one nest drops dramatically, they look for the next nest, in order to prevent the honey source from drying up quickly, because when the colony is disturbed, the queen and worker ants will retreat into the nest with the entire colony members and come out to rebuild the nest after the crisis has passed. Indigenous people believed that it was impossible to dig to the end of the nest because the nest could extend deep into the earth's crust. They also believe that digging too deep may touch the queen lurking deep in the nest, and they believe that the queen is a poisonous snake.
Honey ants are often eaten as a dessert by the locals. When eating honey ants, they first sandwich the honey ant between two fingers and then use their teeth to bite its swollen belly. Australian honey ants are a little sweeter to eat than North American honey ants, and both taste a bit like sugar cane honey, with occasional hints of ant sour. In addition to eating it directly, the indigenous people also added honey from honey ants to incense cakes to add sweetness or to make sweet bread.
In Australian Aboriginal culture, the honey ant is a totemic animal that once occupied a very important place in people's lives, and some tribes in the central region of Australia still maintain the custom of holding various annual ceremonies to harvest honey ants. Today, however, indigenous people are more likely to dig for honey ants as a recreational picnic.