Stealing Neighborhood Ants: A Field Report

I walked into the kitchen, envelope in hand, ready to earn my World’s Greatest Dad mug.  My son’s first ant farm had arrived last week, and now I had the inmates.  Ripping the envelope open, I rolled the tube onto the kitchen counter and stared.  In my experience, ants never stop moving.  These didn’t twitch. 

A memory marched its way across my fatherhood campaign map: the warning on the ant farm instructions saying not to order ants through the mail when the temperature is expected to drop below 55 degrees.  A quick check of the weather app showed 17 degrees; apparently that was below the threshold.  I had killed my son’s ants and would receive no World’s Greatest Dad mug.

What followed was an intricate song and dance finding ways to distract my son from the fact that his promised ants would not be taking up residence in his ant farm.  I bobbed, I weaved, I resorted to bribery—anything to not lose what little ground I had gained in earning his affection. 

The crisis was postponed.  I took to watching the weather forecasts like an ancient Greek consulting the Oracle before invading a rival city-state, praying for deliverance.

After Colorado’s obligatory late April blizzard, I felt that the time had come to try again.  But as luck would have it, nature itself intervened.  On a family walk, my son happened across an active ant hill.  My first thought: I wish I could take those ants and put them in his ant farm.  My second thought: wait a minute…

Frowning down at the colony after I explained my brilliant idea, my wife did not share my enthusiasm.  “Aren’t those fire ants?”

“They’re Colorado ants,” I said with all the confidence of a 30-second Google search behind me.  “Plus, it saves us five bucks.”

When I told my son the plan, his eyes lit up like Teddy Roosevelt on safari being told the locals requested that he, personally, deal with a nearby man-eating lion.  “We can take the ants?” he asked, a world of biological larceny forever embedding itself in his still-forming neural pathways.

Rallying at home, searching through cabinets for containers, debating the optimal grabbing instrument, I prepped for the abduction.  As I gathered the materials, I wondered if this was what aliens might feel like as they got their equipment ready to probe some unfortunate soul no one would ever believe.  Did ants tell similar stories around their campfires?  Did I want to become the terror in the night?  Did I care?

The next day, we returned to the ant hill ready for Operation Father-of-the-Year.  Sensing something was amiss, the ants boiled out of the hill in a frenzy.  My son hooted as I started collecting with a plastic spoon and container. 

Halfway through the operation, a pair of gentlemen walked by.  I, feeling oddly guilty at stealing community ants, didn’t want to draw attention to my efforts.  My son, feeling his first rush of knowing he sat atop Earth’s food chain, screamed at them: “WE’RE CATCHING ANTS!” 

“Uh,” came the instant and entirely warranted response.  “That’s great.”  They scurried off, more eager to vacate the scene than the ants who had finally realized that they were outmatched by my towering intellect.

I came.  I saw.  I didn’t get bitten.

Once we made it home, I spent half the night fighting the ants to get them into their new non-negotiable accommodations.  My son looked on in awe the entire time, consumed by every twitching antenna and gnashing mandible.  Finally, the ants were in, the farm was sealed, and we waited for them to dig.

And we waited.

And we waited some more.

Had I committed grand theft ant-o only to acquire defective ants?  Or was this some sort of proletariat hit job, throwing themselves on the gears of parental industry to sabotage the means of production?

My son went to bed only slightly disappointed, but I promised we’d look at them again first thing in the morning.  I debated giving the ants a lecture on their duty to make me into a good parent, but settled on resting a magnifying glass next to the ant farm instead.  I’ve always found quiet threats carry the loudest message.

0700.  My son, awake.  Me, more anxious than when leading 150 Airmen through a major network outage spanning two continents.  We head upstairs and lift the cover off the ant farm.

Tunnels.  Sweet, glorious tunnels.  Whether it was the threatening, the pleading, or the three-hour seminar on the fundamental flaws in Marx’s rhetoric, the ants decided to perform.  My son’s love?  Acquired.  My wife’s half-hearted respect?  Fully earned.  My validation?  Complete.