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They come into your house if you leave food out in the open. They invade your picnic basket. They even crawl around the walls and corners of your kitchen and bedroom. And the worst part is that they bring hundreds of their friends with them.

We are talking about ants of course. Ants are those tiny black (or sometimes red) insects that seem to be everywhere. We usually ignore them or swat them away if we find one crawling on our food or on us. But what most people do not know is that these small creatures actually lead really big and complicated lives.

Similar to all other insects, ants have six legs with three joints on each leg. The outside of their body is covered with a protective hard layer called an exoskeleton. Ants have two compound eyes which consist of hundreds of smaller sections called facets. Each facet has a small lens that transfers light from the outside to a light sensitive sense organ inside the ant’s head. Because ants have compound eyes (like many other insects) they can distinguish about 200 pictures per second. They also have antennae that are attached to the front of their heads. They not only use their antennae to touch things but also to smell things in the environment. The head of the ant also has a pair of large, strong jaws. These jaws open and shut sideways instead of up and down like humans. The average life expectancy of an ant is about 50-60 days.

Have you ever seen an ant walk away from your picnic area carrying a large piece of food about 10 times its size? Sometimes you make not think about it because the piece of food is so small–but think about the tiny ant that is underneath that piece of food. As you may have noticed ants are incredibly strong. Some ants can actually carry things up to fifty times their weight! And some of these ants can actually carry these objects great distances. If humans had comparable strength, we would be able to carry a car on our backs and walk about ten miles with it! Pretty amazing strength for a tiny insect, huh!?

Ants are social insects, which means that they live together with other ants and collectively find food and protect their home. Ants live in colonies with up to about one million other ants. A fertilized female ant with wings in called the queen. The queen ant usually leaves her colony and attempts to start a brand new colony in a new location. Once the queen finds a protective place to nest she begins to lay eggs. In this initial stage, the queen is responsible for feeding the larvae (the baby ants) and herself, maintaining the nest and protecting the colony from intruders. That is one strong and independent female, don’t you think?

Once the baby ants are grown they begin to do all of the work in the colony and the queen gets to relax and lay more eggs. The worker ants do a variety of tasks ranging from collecting food to protecting the colony from intruders.

When a worker ants finds food they leave behind an invisible chemical trail known as pheromones which leads to the food. This is why you usually see ants marching in a straight line headed directly towards food.

There are thousands of species of ants out there! There are many more interesting and amazing facts about these tiny insects that was not covered in this article. Read on! And the next time you see one of these small insects carrying off a piece of your lunch-let it go instead of squashing it. After all, they work very hard and have millions of relatives waiting at home.