You really would have to quit your job and become a monk to get through them all.īut rather than doing that, why not just read the actual history of the war? Consider an Allied espionage operation code-named GREENUP, which in some ways is even more improbable than a Hollywood pot-boiler. Bingeing spy movies, let us say from Orson Welles’s The Third Man (1949) through Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), would be a lifetime occupation. And when you’re done with all of those hundreds of books, you can turn to film. One of the most popular genres of WWII literature is espionage, the spy novel, the “thriller.” Books abound on the topic, dealing with undercover operatives, double agents, and breathless derring-do. Ants certainly are the world’s oldest, and smallest, farmers.Top Image: L-R Franz Weber, Hans Wijnberg, and Fred Mayer courtesy of the US National Archives. If you are wondering what all the fuss for honeydew is about, you should know that many areas of the world, most notably Germany’s Black Forest, actually tend bee colonies that collect and make honey from honeydew, resulting in a stronger tasting, darker product. When the colony departs one nest site to form another at a new location, they will carry an aphid egg with them, to establish a new herd and maintain their resources. In every species of ants, workers will specialize in different roles such as nursing or foraging to fulfill the needs of the colony - in farming ants, some workers will specialize just in shepherding and caring for the aphids! There's even some evidence that ants build pastures of a sort, to keep their herded aphids in. In return they are allowed to ‘milk’ the aphids- stroking the aphids with their antennae, coaxing them to secrete their honeydew which is then lapped up by the ant.
As a result, a system has been hashed out by these insects wherein the ants herd the aphids around to the juiciest parts of plants, protect them from predators, and carry them into their nests at night and for winter. This secretion is very sugar-rich, and quite favoured by ants as a food source. Several species of ants have a special symbiotic relationship with aphids- they farm them! Aphids feed primarily on the sap from plants and secrete a liquid called honeydew.
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