Welcome we're talking today about ants specifically ants in the desert. I want to go over how ants bred what an ant colony is, under what conditions should you expect to find an ant problem, I want to tell how they operate how they react to certain types of sprays talk about the ants themselves. Ants live in a colony there a social insect there may be different kinds of workers in the colony there’s the queen or multiple queens those are the ones who are responsible for reproducing they lay eggs deep in the nest. Queens an important fact to know about queens they never ever come out. Another important fact is that there are worker majors and worker miners what we call them forgers and only about twenty percent of an average colony ever comes out of its nest in other words are, I’ll repeat that only twenty percent ever come out of the nest so if they take a vacuum and vacuum up all the ants they see, did they get rid of there ant problem no because the worker miners are the ones that help the queen and help the baby larva and the baby ants grow up to be big ants and they never come out and they always have food supply in their nest. But there is a fourth class called the winged reproductives those are the ants that sometimes have wings on them and they are males and females and they fly up and usually mate in the air and they fly to a new location and they start a new colony. Of all the different classes probably the most important are the queens because unless you get the queen you don't get rid of the problem. A lot of people ask the question why do ants walk in a line. Everybody knows that ants walk in a line and they walk in a line because certain forger ants can lay down a chemical trail it's little chemical hormone that they lay down and other ants follow it to the food source chemical trails laid down by ants can last up to a year. How does that, I mean what implications or what is the kind of conclusions can we draw from that. Well if we eliminate an ant colony that is in a consumer's wall completely eliminate it right? Let's say there's another ant colony floating around in their yard just kind of living out there and they pick up on the chemical trail that led into the house that lead the first colony into the house they pick up on that they can shoot right up in. It’s like a freeway system is already been built for them o it's like here floating around out in the yard living kinda good but its still hot there still looking for a better place to live they come across that chemical trail that that forger ant put down from last colony that we eliminated and they'll shoot right back into the house.
