It's fantastic and seems to make my life that little bit more bearable. However, it's become the focal point of a very strange phenomenon.
Over the summer, we've had a real problem with ants. The weather is so hot in New Zealand that you really have to be careful with leaving food out. Make the mistake of leaving something sweet out on the kitchen counter overnight, and you can rest assured that when you wake up there'll be ants everywhere.
We even found that they'd managed to infiltrate sealed glass jars of honey. How? We first thought it was impossible - that they must have created some kind of Star Trek transporter to pass though solid materials. And then we realised how they did it - they travelled along the groove of the screw lid until they got inside the jar. Crafty bastards.
This is nothing though in comparison with their latest trick. A few times I've woken up and walked into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed. I've gone to flick the kettle on and realised that there's something black floating on the water inside it. Astounded by this object, bobbing up and down on the surface about as big as a kidney bean, I've taken a closer look...
It's a raft. Made of ants, with more ants on it. Just floating there, in the middle of the kettle.
Now I'm no scientist but I'm stumped if I know how or why they're doing this. The simplest explanation is that one fell in and they just kept following, like lemmings. But if this had happened, you would expect the water in the kettle to be peppered with ants. What they have done seems almost planned. When you look closer, the dead ants have created a raft by linking their legs together, and then the other ants are sitting on top having a nice sail.
WHY? WHY? WHY?
I guess we're just lucky to have a clear kettle to act as an early-warning device for this odd event. You know those times when you make a coffee and there's undissolved coffee floating on the surface in your cup? Maybe that ain't coffee after all...
All this talk of ants has just reminded me of a fantastic lyric I heard on the radio the other day:
I want to cover you in ants, bees and honey,
Then take a picture for the cover of our album!
Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCPY-zD6e-I
3 comments:
This reminds me of a hideous incident that happened when I was younger, I unscrewed the cap on the mouthwash in my bathroom and found it full of dead ants. I was pretty horrified, but this makes me doubt the super-intelligents of these ants considering that mouthwash doesn't contain any sugar and ended up poisoning them. NZ ants are probably smarter.
And inquiring minds want to know; did you turn the kettle on and boil those little bastards?
Well, the ants follow trails left by other ants. That's why lots of ants get into the kettle. After a while the smell from the trails fades away and the ants stop following it, which is why you don't get every ant in the world in your kettle.
As for them working together to form rafts, that I can't explain. Have you listened to them? They might be talking. Are the making plans for world domination? They sound frighteningly well organised to me.
No Krista, I didn't boil them. I think the thought of boiled ants would linger a bit longer when I'm drinking my morning coffee.
And Moo, I didn't listen to hear if they were talking - although the inside of a glass kettle would make a great ampitheatre. Perhaps that's it - it was Am Dram!
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