The ant swarm is coming – in fact, it may already be here. The best you can do is accept your fate and learn to embrace life with the winged beasts as our tiny overlords.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of tiny flying ants descend upon the UK in high summer when the temperature and humidity reaches a high point. They do this because they thrive in the warmth, and they’re more commonly found in urban areas, which tend to be hotter.
By September the ants will be back in their colonies living their lives in peace. At least, the female ones will. The males will be dead, having fulfilled their one and only purpose of creating new babies. It’s a tough world out there.
Here’s everything you need to know about the flying ant swarms you might start seeing in the coming days and weeks.
Why do flying ants just appear?
Scientists say the ants appear because the species needs to reproduce, and come summertime these ants must spread their wings and find new lands to begin new colonies in.
Flying ants love the warm weather so much that they breed like crazy in the middle of summer, and they like to breed in-flight, causing it to seem like thousands of tiny insects have just appeared. According to the Natural History Museum: ‘Prior to swarming, ants are going about their everyday business and living in a colony in a nest.
‘When the winged males (drones) and virgin queens (princesses) emerge from the nest, they scatter to maximise the chance of mating between different colonies and reduce inbreeding.’ And this is how we get swarming ants.
When is Flying Ant Day this year?
Sorry for the let down, but the idea that there is a single day each year when the ants have co-ordinated a nationwide swarm is a myth. Instead, there are several weeks, usually between the end of July and the beginning of August, where the ants reach peak numbers.
Some took to social media yesterday (July 17) to declare that the flying ants had arrived, which means that we are likely at the beginning of swarming season. However, some researchers believe they only come out on warm, dry days, so we might actually be mostly safe this year. Silver linings.
How long do flying ants live?
The male ants, whose only purpose is to fertilise eggs, die a couple of days after the swarm. The female ants can, in the right conditions, live up to fifteen years, but once they’ve succeeded in creating fertilised eggs they chew off their own wings, so become regular ants. Pretty metal for such a tiny being.
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