Honey ants: their bodies are like barrels of sugar (7 photos)

Honey ants are similar to common ants, but with one significant exception. They inhabit regions with rather specific conditions. Most of the year, the heat is intense, the air is dry, and plant life is virtually nonexistent.





See? Grapes hanging right from the ceiling of the chamber!

Basically, their habitat is deserts and semi-deserts all over the world! But during the rainy season, vegetation flourishes like nowhere else, everything around blooms and bears fruit, and there are more resources around than even the largest ant colony can process.



Some honey ants even look like candy!

So, ants have figured out how to store their surplus in special... capsules. Filled with sweet nectar, these reserves can allow an ant colony to function for months or even years under conditions of a total calorie deficit. Moreover, several unrelated genera of ants from Australia, South Asia, Africa, and South America have come up with this method.





Honey ants don't tend to advertise the location of their nest. The entrance looks something like this.



But if you dig a little, you might find a treasure...

And other animals are very grateful to honey ants for their work. They seek out anthills and destroy them to get to the sweetness hidden within. Humans do the same, because all the locals highly value honey ants, consider them a delicacy, and even call them underground grapes. They really are similar in shape, only much, much sweeter. So, do you want to try them now?



When you're a little overweight after the holidays, and your colleagues have returned to work looking slim.

Oh, don't look at me like that, I wasn't lying to you! I just didn't tell you the whole truth. Well, insects have nowhere to store food except within themselves, so they created a special caste of workers—the pleurergates. These ants have only one job: to gorge themselves until their bellies are bulging with stored food. Then, they hand it over to their brothers and sisters on demand. But this doesn't change the taste of the underground grapes; they're still a pleasant and very tender snack that barely moves in your mouth!



Just close your eyes and chew!



The color of honey barrels directly depends on the composition of the nectar they are fed! In this case, some pranksters gave the ants colored water with sugar.