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The remaining larvae can try again, to be sure, but as their numbers decrease, their portrayal of the bee loses its verisimilitude. This leads to what must be an increasingly uneasy alliance, as the beetles' only hope for survival arrives and the larvae must jostle for a chance to leap onboard. When should a larva stop working harmoniously, break rank with its brothers and sisters, and act solely in its own interests? Hollywood, take note. In my opinion, a movie based on this kind of drama has a lot more appeal than yet another tired take on the dysfunctional family reunion at Thanksgiving.

Chapter 8

Pirates at the Picnic

Today it is accepted as proven that the ant is incontestably one of the noblest, most courageous, most charitable, most devoted, most generous and most altruistic creatures on earth.

—MAURICE MAETERLINCK, 1930

If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

—BERT HöLLDOBLER AND E. O. WILSON, 1994

ANTS may inspire more emotional reactions than any other insect, reactions that go far beyond the revulsion of finding a cockroach scurrying across the kitchen counter or pleasure at seeing a butterfly light on a flower. As the two quotations above attest, ants can be paragons of harmony and virtue, or symbols of bloodthirsty violence. Honeybees come close to ants in serving as reflections of our own society, but we see bees singly, flying from blossom to blossom, rather than en masse, and the workings of the hive are not visible to most of us. Ants, however, stream across our driveways in glistening black ribbons. They seethe through our cereal boxes and bear crumbs triumphantly along edge of the shelf and out the door. With a few moments of casual observation, it's possible to see ants carrying their young from place to place, whereas no one other than beekeepers (and entomologists) ever sees much in the way of bee family life. And they walk, rather than fly, making them a little easier, perhaps, to identify with.

Like many of the other social insects, ants seem to share food unhesitatingly, and they work tirelessly for their colony, as Maeterlinck notes above. Maeterlinck, a Belgian playwright and poet who won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature, was particularly taken by the ants' practice of passing droplets of food from one individual to another, called trophyllaxis, a behavior not seen in most nonsocial insects. For reasons that are not altogether clear, at least to me, he seemed to think that this behavior was intensely pleasurable for the ants, somehow compensating the workers for their lack of sexual activity by a near-orgasmic sensation when the food was transferred.

Solomon, of course, enjoined us to "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." As historian Charlotte Sleigh writes in her entertaining book Ant, "The ant's supposed virtues of industry, prudence and mutual aid were extolled by a great number of people." The diligent ants that labor and save for the winter provide a smug contrast to the grasshopper that fritters the time away in a host of moralistic fables. A fair share of people probably sympathize with the indolent pleasure-seeking half of the story more than with the ants themselves, but the object lesson is clear: hard work is virtuous and will be rewarded. The Victorians seemed especially partial to the idealization of the ants' nobility and stressed the idyllic domestic activity supposedly taking place in the ant nest.

But ants also have a dark side that is obvious to even a casual observer. Naturalists since ancient times noted the apparent wars that raged between ants of different colors, with battles that went on for hours. Army ants are so named for their rampaging behavior. And as Sleigh points out, "The commonly known fact that ants engage in warfare has given them a particular edginess in times of human conflict." And a handful of species of ants exhibit a behavior that is strikingly similar to slavery in humans: one kind of ant will make raids on a colony of another species and steal its young workers, to be reared