Carpenter ants at work

I just posted a gallery of black carpenter ants harvesting honeydew from a herd of aphids. A colony will tend a large number of aphids, protecting them from predators and culling the infectious sick, collecting the sugar-rich secretion the aphids produce in return.

Also some cool shots of two ants exchanging their stomach contents in a process called trophallaxis. The whole colony will have similar proportions of food in their stomachs because of this sharing of food. Gross, but very cool.