ant wars of preschool childcraft bug book Henry David Thoreau

Wed Feb 06, 2019

when i was age 2-3 in the 70s, i lived in an apartment, and the walls had this



those ants were really big and they bite. i know now that's bad news as they were

carpenter ants.

my family moved from that apartment to a home.

in preschool at age 4, sometime in the spring of the 1970s, at preschool, we were had a picnic outside.

i sat on a log and i observed this



i didn't understand what i was seeing, but the teacher told me to stay away, they're ants. not safe.

just a couple of years later in elementary school in 1981 my parents bought me child craft books

one of which was the bug book



in that bugbook it had a couple of pages devoted to ant war,

it describes how red ants go to war with black ants, the red ants steal the cocoons of the black ants and then when they hatch, the black ants serve the red ants as slaves. the black ants do all the work, and the red ants sit back and raid other black ant nests.

so when i read that i understood what i saw as a preschooler.

i got that bug book in the mail, so it must have been 1981, after ronald reagan got elected.

a decade passed, in high school in literature the teacher requied we all read

Henry David Thoreau Walden Pond.

I read it bc it was assigned reading. the classic literature anne of green gables talked about




as i was reading it Henry David Thoreau had a section of him observing an ant war between red ants and black ants.

i remember thinking, wow, i remember this from preschool when i was age 4. never thought to actually write about it.

that preschool had quite a bit of forests and undeveloped land, today that building is now something else and its all pavement.

most of the areas i knew as a kid which was undeveloped in the 1970s is now all pavement, so i don't think i see red ants or black ants very often, and i've not seen the 2 engage in war like i did when i was in preschool.

in some ways my observing this ant war was like some kids who said they saw bigfoot, except ants do engage in war, but all the land is now cement and concrete, not rotting logs.

much like fireflies and butterflies. in the 1970 my memory from childhood was they were everywhere. now its uncommon to see them.

today i head over youtube and they have bugwars i've seen a few. sucks being a bug and eaten by another bug.

so what i saw was something like this



but i've not actually seen a red ant vs black ant war since i was in preschool in the 1970s, in real life. youtube has such examples.

my residence does have the tiny ants, which ant traps and poisoned ant food doesn't seem to work.

the tiny pavement ants you see on sidewalks. i guess that's better than crazy ants, black ants, red fire ants, but still annoying.

so that's my journey on ants, from seeing them as a 2 year old in my apartment, to seeing a red ant vs black ant war in preschool, to reading about it in a book to reading Henry David Thoreau walden pond, to youtube.