Honeypot Ants are real, and found in Australia, Africa, and North America. The honeypot ants have division of labor, with some ants going out to gather food while others stay behind as honeypots. These honeypots are overfed by the workers until their abdomens swell with honey they've created. This way, they work as a living larder for the colony, and can produce honey from their crops and present them to waiting workers. The honey they produce is similar to those created by bees and wasps, the ants just produce it in their bodies instead of in hives.
There are people across the world who eat the honeypot ants, usually by biting off the honey pot part. I'm unaware of humans harvesting the honey from the honeypots while keeping the honeypots alive.
I'm also unaware of the honeypot ants' honey having special characteristics. This aspect of the story is invented entirely from the fact that bee honey can take on different flavors depending on what the bees harvested to produce it, like lavender, sage, buckwheat etc, and the fact that lavender is supposed to have calming properties and sage is supposed to improve sleep. So if we turn this up to eleven and make it magical, honeypot ant honey made with lavender will have calming properties, kind of like those essential oils they sell on the CTA.
This story comes out of the time my friend, Meg, gave our critique group a writing exercise. She gave us each a random Wikipedia article and we had to sketch out a story inspired by it, with the idea of "Hey! Be inspired by new things instead of stuck on the one project you've been working on for years." She gave me honeypot ants, and I said, "What about an entrepreneur with ant friends!" and she was like, "I thought you'd go darker." I think she was expecting that I would write something akin to the milk farm in Fury Road.
Nope!
Ants!
Honeypot Ants! I remember reading about them in National Geographic when I was a kid -- so, of course I had to look it up --- It was in Vol. 121, #3 -- The March 1962 issue -- Page 405. Article was "Living Honey Jars of the Ant World" by Ross E. Hutchins, Page 405. Thanks for the memories! The same issue had an article called "Three whales that flew", about flying whales from Alaska to New York. So now I'm wondering about Star Trek: The Voyage Home :)
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ReplyDeleteThe honeypots carry the communities' emergency food supplies by putting it on their shoulders. Honeypot workers feed the honeypots until their abdomens are filled by a golden sweet liquid. If food sources are scarce they'll rely on their neighbors' reabsorbed reserves.The honeypots, with their large backs are swollen up to the same size as a grape are a vital source that colonies from other colonies will attempt to take the honeypots. They're more than just a food source for insects. The indigenous Australians have also included honeypot ants in their diets for sugar as a source.
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