This morning I went to the Cherry Creek Trail..........just to enjoy the early morning air and to see what I could see........hoping, in particular, I suppose, I might find some dead good rocks, and, perhaps, a prairie dog skull or two (there are oodles of prairie dog holes there), or, even an ARROW HEAD!! You never know.......

As I walked I became more and more intrigued with the different designs for the prairie dog holes.......some looked as if they were designed by some prairie dog architect! As I looked at the different designs, I asked myself, 'Do prairie dogs help each other dig their tunnels? Are some more skilled than others? Do they build just one prairie dog home and live below for ever and a day?'

Fascinating creatures, aren't they? And I just love it when one tells the others that, "Hey, there's a nosey human hanging around. Get back inside your holes, pronto! He's trouble!"

As I stood over one hole, I was aware that the space was shared with a giant (relatively speaking) ant hill.

"Crikey," I thought, "the prairie dog is so much bigger than an ant.....................and yet, look at the size off the anthill!! WOW! Those ants really do work incredibly well together. WHAT a team effort!"

Then I remembered the book I wrote about ants, way back in the late 1970s, The story of the ant, published by Ladybird Press, and the things I learned during the research for the tome.

Available, I see, from Amazon and Ebay!!

The ant really is an an incredible creature, so tiny yet so strong, so determined, and so able to work in a team and build an incredible underground home of tunnels and food supply to support the queen who has the life of, well, a queen!! They have definite roles - workers do all the work, males look after the food collecting and the females ensure there are more and more generations of ants.

I remembered learning about how, when one ant finds a food supply, it'll come back and spread the news by embracing and regurgitating a very tiny amount of liquid that contains all the details another ant needs to find the food supply! I remembered the name of this process and then checked it with Wikipedia:
Trophallaxis /ˌtroʊfəlˈæksɪs/ is the transfer of food or other fluids among members of acommunity through mouth-to-mouth (stomodeal) or anus-to-mouth (proctodeal) feeding. It is most highly developed in social insects such as ants, termites, wasps and bees. The word was introduced by the entomologist William Morton Wheeler in 1918. The behaviour was used in the past to support theories on the origin of sociality in insects.The Swiss psychologist and entomologist August Forel also believed that food sharing was key to ant society and he used an illustration of it as the frontispiece for his book The Social World of the Ants Compared with that of Man.

Oh, then there's the nuptial flight towards the end of the summer when they take off on the nuptial flight and mate in the air!!

Yep, quite a creature - made me think a lot.

Consequently, it turned out to be quite a walk. Oh, and, yes, I found a couple pieces of petrified wood that had crystals set in them. Very beautiful.