Ant Farm

In the 1970s, they had these ant-farm toys for kids. It was like a series of small, rectangular, clear-plastic, mini-aquariums you could interconnect with flexible, clear tubing. It came with a coupon to send away for your free batch of ants to be sent to you in the mail. You can’t call it a colony, because they wouldn’t send you the queen ant, just the workers. Once the workers all died, that was it. No more ants.

I, however, preferred to collect my own ants. That way, I’d never run out. It just so happened that the same exact species of ant that the ant-farm people would send out were also native and plentiful where I grew up as a boy.

My favorite thing to do when I was about four, five, and six years old was to walk down the street with an empty metal coffee can and a stick and look for red ant hills. They weren’t hard to find, once you recognized the telltale giveaway signs all around their holes, plus all the red ants coming in and going out.

Despite the ant-farm people mailing them all over the world to little kids, these red ants bit and stung like bastards. That didn’t bother me, though. I was always too fascinated by their behavior to care too much about the stings around my ankles, once they crawled up my shoes and got past my socks. They were vicious little buggers. Although I did try smearing Vaseline on my shoes one time to make them slip off or else get stuck, but that didn’t work at all. They just crawled right over the Vaseline like it was nothing. If anything, the Vaseline gave the ants better gription.

One time I went to one of my favorite red-ant hills down the street where I knew there was a nest, and there were TONS of them crawling all over the ground. They had all come up on top and had left their underground tunnels. Many of them had wings and were bigger than the workers. These were crawling up whatever they could find and then spreading their wings and flying off, or else they were taking off right from the ground if they could. They were flying off in all directions, all around me. It was amazing! It was clearly a great big deal in their Kingdom of the Ants down there.

I was five. But I deduced what was going on. These were the queens. They were going off to start new red ant hills. I felt overjoyed, like I had happened upon something famous. It was a miracle. This was rare and a special event. And when it was happening, I’m sure my legs all stung up more than just the usual amount of times, but I don’t remember any of that. I only remember marveling how I had made a big discovery about the ant world.

And I looked down right then and I saw it. The yellow one. The one and only time I have ever seen a yellow red ant. It was different from all the rest. But none of the others were attacking it, so you knew it was still one of them. It’s the only way you could tell. It was so different, it stuck out like a sore thumb. And there was only one of them. I had stumbled onto my second big discovery about the Kingdom of the Ants all in one day, and all at the same ant hill: There was such a thing as a yellow red ant.

I was the only kid to ever see such a thing. There were lots of kids at my kindergarten, but none of them had a ant farm, and none of them even cared about ants. Just me. I was the only one.