The Procession of the Mexican Cutter Ants

 We have lots of processions and parades in San Miguel de Allende.  Luckily only this one is inside the walls of my gardens.  It is no small feat for the cutter ants to march from wherever they begin to strip a plant of all of its leaves, and I do mean ALL, to the street where they take it down, underground to their ant homes.

I came home today to see this procession heading across the flagstone directly in front of my door to the casa.  It's an annual thing so I don't get excited.  I used to try to control them with ant poison, water or whatever means anyone would suggest.  However, I've learned over the years that these wily creatures WILL survive and I could die of frustration.

So now, I just step over them and go into the house.

Last year, a kind friend gave me five or six large oleander bushes to plant on the side wall of the garden.  In my mind I was thinking, "They're big; oleanders are poisonous; the ants won't touch them""   Au contrare  They had those shrubs deleafed in three days.  Every last one of them!  Add to that, any time they started to releaf, they stripped them again.  I checked today and they still have leaves.  I'm anxious to see if they forgot about them and will leave them alone this year.

When I asked my son, whose  first degree was as a wildlife biologist about this, here is what he told me.

"They don't eat the leaves.  They carry them below ground once the earth becomes warm enough for them to do so.  They use them to pad their nests in preparation for the rainy season."  Okay, the rainy season is five months away, at least! 

Then I started thinking of how slow they go.  How many of them there are.  How far a distance it is from plant to street.  Yup, about five months to get it wherever it is underground seems about right.

I'm just amazed and fascinated by this annual pilgrimage.  It's my way of waiting for the groundhog to come up to tell us if winter is over.  Here it's the cutter ants. I think they know when the earth is going to start warming.

By the way, last night was the first time since December that I haven't had to turn on the heater all night.

Isn't it incredible that something so tiny knows what's going on?  Knows what it has to do.  AND, gets it done without complaining.  Well, at least as far as I know, that is.

The other incredible thing to me is the fact that I have time to notice such things!