I lived for years in a suburban apartment complex built c. 1970. When the weather turned warm, ants would appear in the bathroom of my ground-floor unit. To echo Mark Twain, these are not the scary kinds of celebrity über-ants seen on TV who drill, vote, keep livestock, etc. They are standard tiny dark-brown “house ants” which mostly wander(ed) around in ones and twos, looking lost, and after several days vanished of their own accord. During the worst infestations they also appeared in the kitchen.
Management claimed it couldn’t be helped; the ants were “in the walls”.
I once joked to a visitor that the ants didn’t bother me, and that in any case they’d lived there longer than I had. But that got me to wondering just how much longer. That is, I assume the ants living “in the walls” came from a colony or colonies inhabiting the land before the complex was built. And it seems at least possible that the land was undisturbed and ant-supportive for centuries, perhaps eons. There’s no obvious indication that they themselves travel (migrate?) or were brought to the area by natural means.
Is it possible that the ants (or other insects, BTW) appearing in our homes come from colonies/nests that are thousands of years old? Have entomologists ever explored this mundane question?
Well yes they could come from ancient colonies, although not likely thousands of years. Most any species will simply produce a new queen if the old queen dies and many species have multiple queens or a mix of queens and fertile workers at the one time. So there is no actual limit on how long any one colony can survive in one location.
Having said that however it’s unlikely that any ant colony could survive the earthworks associated with building an apartment block. These ants would almost certainly be recent arrivals.
Ants do travel, that’s indisputable. The queens themselves are winged and capable of flying many miles with a favourable wind so it’s entirely possible for these ants to have come from a colony outside the city. More likely however they simply flew in form next door.
Moreoever ants will disperse by foot and many species routinely do so as population pressures build up in one nest. The workers carry eggs and the queens themselves either walk or are carried with a bodyguard. In this manner they can travel quite widely and disperse many miles in a year.
And of course ants can easily be transported as whole colonies accidentally in furniture, luggage etc.
So there’s no need for millennial ant colonies. The simplest explanation is that this colony simply moved in once the building was completed.
I appeal: is it permissible to use a SDMB cliché in its original, unmodified ironic meaning? It sounds to me like a violation of the Catch Phrase Twisting and Overuse Protocol.
