The ants make the digging less fun. When I dig into a part of an ant nest, the first thing that happens is that lots of little ants run around, taking eggs and grubs away from the disturbance and further underground. These ones are about 4 mm long. As the digging goes on, the little ants vanish and and bigger, slightly darker ants appear. These are about 7-8 mm long, and they mill about on the surface within a few feet of the place where the nest was disturbed. If I keep standing on the same spot for more than ten seconds or so, they find me and begin climbing up my boots. They also end up on my hands, because I've been picking up the lumps of grass to shake the earth out of them - I want to get rid of the couch grass but keep as much of the soil as possible.
They have quite a nasty sting - it feels like a first degree burn, where the skin turns red and painful, but doesn't blister. The red patch is a bit smaller than a 5p piece, and the burning sensation slowly fades over about 6-8 hours. It is considerably worse than a nettle but nowhere near so painful as a wasp sting.
Because of this aggressive defence, today I just dug away the ant hill seen in the photo in yesterday's post. I thought I'd just remove that bit, and then go away while the soldier ants milled about. With luck that will reduce the amount of ant activity when I dig over bed number three.
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