For Christmas, Maybe Her Very Own Ant Farm

This is the story of an ant.

It began last fall when my 4-year-old son, Sam, announced that the one thing he wanted for Christmas was an ant farm. I was less than enthusiastic, having never enjoyed a warm relationship with ants. Our association to that point had revolved primarily around their attempts to please their queen with the contents of my kitchen.

I tried to talk Sam out of the ant farm. “We could get a book about ants,” I suggested. “Or how about a magnifying glass so you could study them outside?” But he was not moved. On Christmas morning, Sam’s joy at the ant farm made me almost glad Santa had brought it.

That was before the ants arrived.

They came by mail in a thick packet from Uncle Milton (proprietor of Uncle Milton’s Industries Inc., makers of the world’s most popular ant farms). I leafed through the accompanying booklet, trying to delay the moment when I came face to face with my son’s new friends. I learned many interesting facts. Sam quickly tired of facts. He wanted ants.

They were ants all right: each a living, breathing Pogonomyrmex californicus with a head, a thorax and an abdomen, as Uncle Milton’s book had informed me. They were red ants, but not the kind that bite. I learned this while trying to transfer the ants from a half-inch-wide test tube into a quarter-inch opening in the ant farm.

Finally the ants were in their new abode and things were once again relatively calm. I even found it interesting in a sadistic sort of way to watch “the most industrious members of the insect kingdom” come to grips with the fact that although the plastic walls were clear, they were hard and impenetrable. The only tough moment that first day was when Sam cried for 10 minutes because we wouldn’t let him sleep with the ant farm in his bed.

On rising the next morning, I did a quick inventory to make sure the ants were still where we’d left them. They were. What’s more, just as Uncle Milton had promised, they had gotten right to work.

Already there were the beginnings of tunnels through the sand, and the ants were busy piling the grains they’d removed into a hill. We fed them some brown sugar (I knew from my kitchen they liked it) and watched them feed. Over the next week, our new pets created an intricate maze of caverns and shafts.

In spare moments, I continued my studies in Uncle Milton’s little book. I noted with interest the social makeup of the ant kingdom. Female ants come in two varieties--the queen, whose job it is to “lay thousands and thousands of eggs” over perhaps 15 years, and the workers, which, Uncle Milton tells us, are all female and work nonstop “from the moment they become adults to the day they are carried to their ant graveyard by their ant pallbearers.” The pallbearers, I might note, are also female.

Now you may wonder, as I did, why the menfolk aren’t out there pulling, too. According to Uncle Milton, the males spend their entire time in the colony trying to impregnate the queen. I can just imagine evening conversations in the kingdom. “Hon, would you mind bringing me some of that sugar you hauled in? I’m exhausted from a hard day of mating.” I began to feel a strong sense of solidarity with my sister ants.

Then Sam decided to take the gang to preschool for sharing. I’ve never been entirely sure what happened that day, but when the ants returned home, a number of them were lying stiffly with their legs pointed up in the air. Some of their finest tunnels lay in ruins.

Over the week that followed, death cast a long shadow on the ant farm. We went from a high of perhaps 40 ants to just five or six, and those remaining looked anything but healthy. The main activity of the ones who’d managed to hold on was no longer building their city. They had become undertakers, carrying their dead up to the surface and then burying them with sand brought grain by grain from below. Our ant farm had become an ant mausoleum.

After another week, all but one of the ants had died. The last one seemed listless, but she kept plugging. For nearly a month she somehow held on.

Every few days I gave her a grain of brown sugar or a bread crumb along with a drop or two of water. From time to time she would seem to be on her last legs, but each morning when I checked, she was still kicking. After the dead were all buried, the last ant tended to stay below ground, inspecting the tunnels and occasionally moving a grain of sand from one place to another.

Then one morning about two months ago, I realized I hadn’t seen the ant farm for several days. I asked Sam, but he had no memory of where it was. I was alarmed in a way that made me realize how attached to the last ant I had become. I searched for more than an hour that day, to no avail. I continued my search sporadically over the next several weeks, telling myself that I was merely curious about how a plastic ant farm could have vanished.

My dreams told a different story. I dreamed about the Last Ant. In my dream, I found the ant farm and the Last Ant was still alive, barely. Then, as I watched, she died.

Last month, an amazing thing happened. I found the ant farm in a box where my son had stashed it for reasons comprehensible only to a 4-year-old. It was nearly five weeks since the ant farm had disappeared. The Last Ant was alive.

I had another dream. In this one, Christmas was coming again. I told my husband that there was only one thing I wanted as a gift. In my dream, on Christmas morning I unwrapped one solitary present. It was my own, Uncle Milton’s Giant Ant Farm.

In a sad postscript, Horton reports that the Last Ant expired shortly after this story was completed. She now is buried, entombed in the ant farm with the rest of her colony, in Horton’s back yard.