The Mystery Behind Ants Carrying Flowers

I am sitting in my old dog-chewed chair, coffee in hand, enjoying the typically cool Ranikhet summer morning. Having outdone itself this year, my vervain (verbena) plant is keeling over, colouring my porch in bright purple. I wait for the hummingbird hawk moth to do its skip-and-dance routine over the delicate flowers. Its high-speed momentum makes the bush sway, dislodging florets. I watch one of the florets walk away in a hurry. I know what I saw. There is no evidence to prove it until the floret turns direction. I see a little red ant holding the narrow end of the floret tube, heading for the stairs. Before I can upheave myself, it has disappeared down two steps and out of sight. Curiosity now tickled; I grab my camera. I spend three dawns, dusks, and random hours of the day unravelling the mystery of my bohemian garden ant.

Thanks to a friend of a friend who knows ants, I learn that the genus is Leptogenys sp. I have no idea what they do with flowers, but they do move like an organised silent army. They communicate via touch and pheromones and make sounds by rubbing body parts. 

My on-ground research and frantic online searches reveal the implausible. I see smaller ants —not one, but several— carrying florets down a long route to a crack in the wall, the location of their nest. They don’t all take the stairs; occasionally, some plunge head-down the cliff face of the wall. Some drop the florets — I will never know if by intent — but they get picked up below.

Inadvertently, I stumble upon a microhabitat. Below the crack in the corner of a stair is a tiny, tiny heap of purple verbena. It looks almost like a tribute deposited by the army of worker ants. You would never notice it; it looks like a small wind-swept cluster. Bigger blacker ants surface, then a few breeding females with the wider thorax. I see some disappearing in the dark void of the crack, which is their nest.

I spy on the worker ants bringing in dead insects of all sizes, sometimes at 6 am and even at the end of the day. They glide the stockpile into the narrow nest opening with the ease of professional movers. They manage the shift so swiftly that I am unprepared and miss several photo-ops. I choose not to get too close, using the video route mostly to zoom in.

Not all the Nordic crime series I devour prepares me for the big reveal. I detect a pile of skeletal carcasses under the petals. A stash of bodies under a deceptive wall of liverwort growing around the nest. The flowers are merely a cover-up. A purple mattress over a hidden stash of grasshoppers, moths, beetles, earthworms, earwigs, and whatnot. I notice worker ants with bits of food in their mouth heading to the nest. My hunch is they are behaving pretty much like gatherers. They don’t hunt but pick up dead insects, gathering them at their nest site (or close enough) and munching bits off to transport. A good scavenging job in hiding.

I am not the first to see ants covering up dead insects with flowers. Last year, a woman called Sophie Klahr saw two dead bees on the pavement with ants covering them with small yellow petals. Her post went viral on social media, as did the speculation about why ants behaved as they did. “Bee funerals” and “distracting with scents” were popular responses. An article in The Scientist (titled “Science Snapshot: One Insect’s Corpse Is Another’s Breakfast”) reports ants are “making the most of what’s around”. Meaning ants are using flowers to cover up their food cache because flowers are easily available; I so relate to that. More often than not, the flavours of a meal I cook depend on what’s lying around in my fridge. Ants possibly use flowers, leaves, mud or who knows what as a smokescreen to hide their food from their competitors. Practical creatures.

I am wiser (and also privileged) to see and document the secret world of ants right at my doorstep. It’s a quaint neighbourhood with several microhabitats. What’s happening in yours?