It’s Flying Ant Day!

Today is Flying Ant Day: the day that ants take to the air and fly at the same time. The ants are from different colonies that can be several hundred metres apart.

Let’s celebrate Flying Ant Day!

Swarm of flying yellow ants in Nowhere Wood.
Swarm of flying yellow ants in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
To some, it’s a minor nuisance. They land in your lemonade, tangle in your hair, and make picnics suddenly less romantic. A swarm of tiny aviators with no regard for personal space.

Flying ants on the flowers of common ragwort.
Flying ants on the flowers of common ragwort. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
Is there really anything much to celebrate? Would we not be better off without ants?

But pause a moment—really look. This is the wedding flight, the briefest of honeymoons, when new queens and males take to the skies to mate and search for new grounds and new beginnings. It’s a natural marvel unfolding on our doorsteps, so what is going on below the surface?

It starts underground, beneath a cracked paving stone, under a patch of sun-warmed earth:  this is the colony, the kingdom of the ants. The colony pulses with organised  purpose.

Yellow meadow worker ants.
Yellow meadow worker ants in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
Tunnels and chambers run through the soil, branching and looping. Here, everything has a rhythm. The queen lays eggs, which are tended and nurtured. The queen is guarded with  reverence because she is the provider of life to the colony.

Their larvae are fed and thousands of identical worker ants are formed.  These do not have wings.

The power of ants lie in their numbers.

Some ants are the pirates of the wood: ferocious and aggressive, they will attack those who cannot defend themselves or have not learned to work with the ants. Like pirates, ants will protect anything that gives them what they want – usually food.

Some species roam in teams, tracking down caterpillars, beetle larvae, or even spiders. They subdue them not with brute force, but with strategy: surround, immobilise, overwhelm. A single ant may be no match for a wasp larva, but a dozen? A hundred? That’s a different story. Their venom can paralyse, their mandibles shear, and their numbers do the rest.

These ants are farming blackflies
These ants are farming blackflies. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
Other ants are the gentle manipulators of blackfly insects, tending huge herds of them.

Blackflies suck the juices of a plant, excreting sweet sticky “honey dew”, which feeds the ants in the colony. In exchange, the ants give the blackflies protection and time to reproduce. Some ants actively”farm” the blackflies, by stroking them gently with their antennae to encourage them to produce honeydew. Like milking a cow.

Biologists call ants ‘keystone’ species. In architecture, the keystone is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the whole structure together. Remove it, and everything collapses.

Ants play this role in the architecture of the wood. Their tunnelling aerates the soil, letting water and oxygen reach the roots of plants. They break down waste, dead insects, and fallen leaves—recycling the detritus of life into the ingredients for growth.

Some species plant seeds by accident, dropping them underground where they germinate safely. Others protect plants from pests or farm aphids like cattle. A colony is not just a nest: it’s an engine of fertility, a subterranean society that quietly underpins the world above.

Take them away, and you begin to see the gaps. Soils become compacted. Nutrients stop cycling. Other animals—birds, lizards, even mammals—that feed on ants start to vanish too. The threads of connection begin to unravel.

The world is a better place with ants – and the flying ants are crucial, for this is where new queens mate with males and go to form new colonies, so the cycle of life continues for one more year. As long as the old colonies have healthy queens, they will continue, so that Flying Ant Day is a way of mixing together different colonies, to make and spread new ones.

The ants benefit, and so does Nowhere Wood, so, let’s celebrate Flying Ant Day!

  1. Why is it an advantage for a new queen ant to fly away from the colony before laying her eggs?

 

 

Notes on the story

Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood

Echoes from Nowhere

It is twilight on the first warm evening after midsummer: a black shape flickers like a dream above our heads. The bat moves quickly, all in a blur, and it is hard to make out its form. We can see the zig-zag patterns it makes in the air.

Behind her, in the rafters of an old house on Station Road, other bats stir. One by one, they slip into the darkening air, part of an invisible night orchestra tuning up for the hunt. In Nowhere Wood, when the bats fly, night begins not with darkness — but with a single common purpose.

Six months later, the scene is different. A single bat hangs motionless in a quiet, cool corner of a garage, undisturbed and dim. Tucked away, wrapped in its own wings, it waits out the winter by hibernating.

Pipistrelle bat hibernating in garage
Pipistrelle hibernating in a garage on the Trendlewood estate. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
These are pipistrelle bats — the most common bats in Britain. But there is nothing ordinary about them. In summer, they dance in the dusk. In winter, they vanish into the stillness. And in both seasons, they remind us that nature has rhythms of its own, hidden just out of sight.

Some people are scared of bats, with their ugly faces and their associations with vampires and terror.

Pipistrelle bat
Pipistrelle bat, [Photograph by: Dave on Flickr, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/wolf_359/123404678/in/datetaken/ ]
In fact, they are harmless to us and they help to keep the insect populations at bay in the height of the summer.  A bat hunts insects using echolocation, producing clicking sounds that bounce off the insect back into the bat’s ears. The bat then flies towards the insects to catch its prey. Different species of bat produce different frequencies of sound.

In 2017, a survey of the area around Nowhere Wood showed that there were at least five and possibly as many as 13 species of bat in the lands around the wood. This makes it one of the most important sites for bats in the county.

Here are some of the bats that the survey found:

Noctule bat. [Photograph: Dave on Flickr, ttps://www.flickr.com/photos/wolf_359/ Dave]
Noctule bat. [Photograph: Dave on Flickr]
Brown long eared bat
Brown long eared bat. [Photograph by: Dave on Flickr]
A lesser horseshoe bat in flight.
A lesser horseshoe bat in flight. [Photograph by Thomas Winstone on Flickr]
A close up of a serotine bat
A close up of a serotine bat. [Photograph by YACWAG on Flickr ]

We should feel proud of our local bats. They are a special feature of our parkland and wood, that survive because they are able to find food and safe places to hibernate.

  1. How can we ensure that these bats will continue to live and feed in and near Nowhere wood?

 

 

Notes on the story

Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood

The Lords and Ladies of Nowhere Wood

Nowhere Wood in late winter is a place of bare branches, weak shadowy light and unspoken secrets, waiting for new leaves start to emerge.

Lords and ladies in January
Lords and Ladies in January [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

On the woodland floor, hidden beneath the shade of hazel and hawthorn, something strange is happening. By April, it is fully revealed.

Lords and ladies, in Nowhere Wood April
Lords and Ladies, in Nowhere Wood, April [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

It’s not flashy, no pretty flower show. Just a apple-green leaf, twisted like a bishop’s cowl. A greenish-purple hood half-hiding something inside. You’d walk past it if you didn’t know better.

The plant is Arum maculatum, but no one calls it that around here. It has lots of ancient names, some of which are so rude that they would make Geoffrey Chaucer blush! In Somerset, it was called ‘Adam and Eve’, but most places call it Lords and Ladies, and there’s a good reason for that. With a little imagination, we can see the tall upright lord dancing with his lady in the flowing green gown.

This is a flower and it is a seed making factory. It does this by subterfuge, luring insects and holding them hostage until it gets what it wants.

Lords and ladies flower exposed
Lords and Ladies flower exposed, [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

One glance inside the sheath and you’ll see the machinery of the deception: “the Lord”  is called a spadix,  sitting on top of a ring of yellow hairs that point downwards. Below them are the orange ovaries, that will become fruits containing the new seeds. These are the “Ladies”.

Beneath the ladies are the yellow pollen-making anthers, that ripen after the ovaries have received pollen from insects.

Down in the gloom of the woodland floor, the spadix heats up,  becoming  warmer than the air around it, which attracts small insects.  It also gives off a  smell of rotting meat and dung — irresistible, if you’re a midge or a small fly looking for a good meal.

They blunder in, hunting decay. Down they fall, past a ring of slippery hairs that trap them in the chamber below. There’s no nectar. No reward. But while they wander round, they give up their pollen to the ovaries. The pollen grows tubes that towards the egg cells, fertilising them, and making new seeds.

The stamens burst open with fresh pollen, which give the insects a quick meal, whilst covering their bodies in pollen.

The yellow hairs of the jail bars have withered overnight, allowing the insects to escape with their pollen load. No harm done, the insects immediately carry the pollen away to the next ripe lords and ladies flower in the wood.

lords and ladies fruits, nowhere Wood, June. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]
Lords and Ladies fruits, Nowhere Wood, June. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

By June. the sheath is long gone. But what remains is a spike of fruits, ready to ripen in the late summer sun. As bright as traffic lights, the fruits rise like a warning from the shade. Poisonous, yes. But beautiful.

ripe fruits of lords snd ladies in Nowhere wood, July.
ripe fruits of Lords snd Ladies in Nowhere Wood, July. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

The autumn is a time for making food, using its large leaves that are designed to capture the dim light of the woodland floor. The food is stored underground in a rhizome.

young leaves of lords and ladies, in Nowhere Wood, January
young leaves of lords and ladies, in Nowhere Wood, January. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

Later, the leaves disappear and the plant lives underground for the winter.

Rhizome of Lords and Ladies plant
Rhizome of Lords and Ladies plant. [Photograph: Neuchâtel Herbarium, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neuch%C3%A2tel_Herbarium_-_Arum_maculatum_-_NEU000100869.jpg]

It lives on as a secretive rhizome, sleeping through the summer heat and the turning year, until — just as the bluebells fade — it returns to play its part again.

  1. Each ripe red fruit contains a seed of the Lords and Ladies plant. Birds, like thrushes and backbirds love to eat these fruits. Explain how this helps to disperse the seeds away from the parent plant.
  2. What are the advantages to small insects of going inside a Lord and Ladies flower?

 

Notes on the story

Echoes from Nowhere