AAAANNNNNNTTTTTSSSSSSSS!!

So there I was, photographing some more stuff at the Botanical garden, when all of a sudden I noticed all of these very awesome ants climbing the bark of the tree single-file, taking the buds of the tree´s flowers off. And it was really cool. Then, it got even cooler when I started following their huge trail (which was HUGE, like the entire colony mut have been out collecting), and I found their ant hole about thirty feet away. I was such a nerd, and I took tons of pictures, some of which came out okay.

Oh look, they´re in a line. How adorable.

Oh my god, more of them!

It´s like the Lion King, only not as cool

Teamwork!

At about this point, I wondered how healthy this is for the tree, and came to the conclusion: probably not at all. I hope that the tree has some kind of defenses, since I´m pretty sure that since it´s a foreign species from China, they aren´t used to these types of native South American ants.

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah...

Me trying to get a good picture of what the ants look like.

Curses! It´s blurry.

At this point, I was looking on the ground, and going "oh... my... god..."

Can you see the trail in the grass? Hint: it´s the little white dots.

How about here?

Goes off to the upper right, I believe

Taking pictures of ants in grass is very hard.

I found the ant hole!

And lost it several times.

This doesn´t give the proper scale for how far far this line of ants went. That tree behind the blocky thing? That´s the tree they were taking from. I took this picture from about three feet up in the air, and directly beneath me was their nest. If you look closely, you can see the little white petals in the foreground, or maybe I´m just crazy. Also worth nothing: about ten feet away from the nest, the path diverged, with one path going along the grass and up the tree to the highest branches, and the other went down to the path on the right of the picture to pick up more of the buds that fell off.