Captured this little guy carrying a dead fly back by himself to the nest within the wall that is in my garden.
Black Garden Ants, binomial name, Lasius niger, are truley spectacular creatures which I have always had an underlying respect for. They are incredibly intelligent, they can follow the sents of the other ants and also count how many steps they have taken away from the nest in order to know how to get back. As well as them being intelligent, they are one of the strongest creatures on the planet and are able to carry 50 times their own body weight!
The queen normally mates with the male ant within the summer mounths and can live up to 12 years, as for the males, they only live for 1-2 days after mating with the queen. The workers (the ants that collect the food and resources) are all female ants that have no babies of their own and help to raise the young, their sisters, produced by their sole mother, the queen.
If you wanted to eat ants (highly nutritious and high in protein), you have to cook them for at least 6 minutes in order to get rid of the formic acid, or else they will taste rather bitter!
Just in case you felt like a nibble 😉