Flying ants and grubs

April 20, 2008

“Are these pictures of flying ants?” I asked, looking at the photo of two waspy looking insects craweling around on a table top. The ants had been placed beside a teaspoon and the body of each was easily as large as the spoon head.

“They sure are”, Norma replied cheerfully and then popped out of her chair and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll fry some up for you, you’re going to love them. It’ll be fun.” She said over her shoulder.

I didn’t have time to decline and in about 5 minutes a bright yellow plate appeared with large winged ants a nice crispy brown.

“You just have to pull off their wings and legs, and then the head”, she instructed as she followed suit and quickly consumed three to four making a little pile of body parts on the table. “They’re nice and buttery, she said, “we just love them.” The buttery morsels made delectable crunching sounds as if she was eating corn chips.

I had just managed to pull the appropriate body parts off a large queen ant and was finding it difficult to imagine the delicacies inside.

“Do the insides squirt out when you eat it?” I asked.

“No, not really” was the reply. “It’s just kind of crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.”

I looked at my decapitated ant. It had a soft furry body and segments along its carapace. There was a bit of white goo apparent peeking through the hole that used to hold it’s head. I held the segmented body up and poised to enter my digestive system. Norma by now had retrieved more frozen ants from the freezer. She was looking for the big ones. Apparently the queens had more flavor then the males because of all the eggs they were carrying inside. Now she was consuming them like pop corn. “These are better, she said, they’re more fresh.”

I decided to eat mine quickly before she started giving me frozen ones. I tossed the bug in my mouth and crunched down before I could feel the furry bits. I could taste a nutty flavor not unlike a toasted pecan. The outside crunched and the soft inside blended with the exoskeleton. In truth it wasn’t so bad. I couldn’t quite get beyond the picture of black ant outsides and insides on my tongue and gulped the lot down as best I could.

“Not bad”, I said.

“See Barb, you’re tough, I knew you could do it!” My cheering squad said. Then Norma mentioned the grubs she had in her freezer. “ Those are good too, do you want to try some of those?” I thanked her profusely but thought we should probably save those for another day. (“Like the day after I left”, I was thinking.)

Norma went on to describe how you caught the flying ants. Normally ground dwellers, their appearance followed a heavy electrical storm followed by a balmy clear day. The drones would come out first and begin cutting the grass around the colonies entrance hole to clear a path for the queen. When the workers had finished an area the size of a dining room table would be cut short in the jungle grass.

The villagers recognized this certain pattern of climate and gathered around the ant holes to stake their claims. Like junkies awaiting tickets for a concert they laid out blankets to await the coming of the queen. When the ants began heading for the front door they were quickly captured and consumed on the spot. According to Norma they had much more flavor when they were fresh.

There are stories of patients that came into the hospital with horrible stomach pains and abdominal cramping. Tests were run, blood was drawn, and no abnormalacy could be found. Then the ant block would pass and everyone would remember that the ants had recently swarmed and they had been a bit overzealous in flying ant consumption. The mass of undigestable ant parts would lodge some where in the bowels causing a massive obstruction.

I certainly wasn’t going to have that problem.