Weaver ant?
Best confirm this with local knowledge.
Looking to identify this ant that I took a pic of on the wall of thw hallway in our home in Thailand - particularly as my son has medical conditions and would not be a good candidate to get bitten if there was a risk of bite severity. The ant was probably half an inch in size.
Any thoughts?
Weaver ant?
Best confirm this with local knowledge.
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
"You gotta know when to hold em and know when to fold em".
The bite of male weaver ants can be very painful but handily you can also tell the sex of them by simply dropping one in a bowl of water. If it sinks: girl ant. If it floats: boy ant.
Some ant species (e.g. fire ants) can sting like a wasp - injecting venom, and some ants - like these - can only bite and cover the bite with formic acid.
Both hurt, but in people prone to anaphylaxis, the first type is much more dangerous to them, whereas this type is less likely to provoke a dangerous immune response.
Make sure your son understands to leave the ants (and all insects &c) well alone. Kids being kids, you can never remind them of these things too often...
The Earl is indeed correct
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
"You gotta know when to hold em and know when to fold em".
Never seen picture of striped weaver ant.
Check out the AntWiki Thailand https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Thailand, if you have a few hours to spare.
When you spend more time in hot climates your aversion to insects soon wanes. Also they are living in their natural environment and they are never going to go away, they will always come back. Just accept it and live with it. They keep their distance as they have no interest in humans so just live and let live.
Funny thing about ants is the frequency with they spontaneously combust when you’re looking at them under a magnifying glass. What are the odds.
( no, not really.)
Once or twice I’ve had the crap scared out of me by a cicada coming into the house and flying slowly and noisily around like a small Sopwith Camel. However I can report that they are oversized wimps that drop like a stone, heavily and definitely terminally, in the face of a brandished electric tennis racquet.
Always amazes me how these things were first discovered. Like the fella that went in the sea, pulled out some seaweed and said to his pals ‘anyone fancy some laver?’ Or the person that said ‘I’m just going to go over there and milk that cow as I fancy some in my cup of tea’.
Introducing cows to this thread seems pretty vacant
Don't just do something, sit there. - TNH
Pales into insignificance compared to the tea itself.
"I'm thisrty - think I'll sail to another continent, pick some leaves off a bush, bring them back, dry them, dessicate them, pour boiling water on them, then drink the resulting liquid, maybe with a squirt of some strange friut that I will obtain via another sail, this time to Southern Europe, pick off a tree, bring back, and squeeze into my drink. Much easier than a glass of water!".
What happened was that the chaps from the East India Company went over to India to trade with them and found the place to be a hot and sticky. The Indians invented tea centuries before to cool down and to refresh themselves.
The EIC capitalised on it by creating tea plantations and then exported the stuff all over the world.
They didn't moan about the weather like the current Brits do, they got off their asses and created an industry.
I will admit I cannot visualise how a bunch of cavemen had the wisdom to design Stonehenge, moved bloody great stones for several hundred miles just to create something that lets the sun shine through two stones just twice a year.
But can you imagine some long bearded bloke trying to convince the head honcho that it makes sense to get thousands of cavemen to spend years shifting some bloody great stones down to Salisbury and then do the almost impossible task of erecting them in a certain way to the sun will be seen only two days a years. How did they know it would work?