Ant-i-social behaviour

I know, it's just an ant - what's so special about that? But they were behaving rather oddly today. I have an assortment of pots on the back steps, some of which have no saucers. Today a collection of these large ants (they're about a centimeter / half an inch long) were excavating soil from the drainage holes at the bottom of one of the larger pots. Well that's not too surprising I suppose, they're probably building a nest. But they were passing the soil out to other ants who were carrying it to the edge of the step and hurling it over the edge. Then another series of ants on the next step down were clearing the pile of soil the first ants had created on this new step by carrying it to the edge of their step and hurling it off. All very odd.

What is neither odd nor surprising is my tiredness at the moment. Our next guest arrived late last night, while I was dozing on the sofa. He is a teacher and knows pretty much all that is worth knowing about natural history, so of course the kids fall on him with questions and observations as soon as he arrives. He seems to revel in this and has endless patience for their chat. (He wasn't sure what was going on with the ants either though.)

We had a nice walk this morning along the Roman Road to the picnic spot from the other day (no picnic today though - no way I'm carrying all that stuff in this heat!) and then a not entirely enjoyable conversation with Conor about why he suddenly at the last minute didn't want to go to football training. Letting folk down is a big no-no in this family and that goes for sports teams as much as for friends, so he's been grounded for a few days to help him understand how seriously this is viewed around here. So he had a whole hour of dictee (spelling) which he sat through meekly and did rather well. Still rather he was out kicking a ball around.

After all that, there was a hoopoe hunt (unsuccessful) for Mr B and Andy, much barbie food and some chat.