What in the hill

We Americans like to say that something clearly superior is "the bee's knees," but in Australia, the superlative gets called "the ant's pants."

And with more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world, that's a lot of pants! Here's how they break it down: In any ant colony, you'll find three kinds of ants:  The queen, the female workers, and males.

Funny, that's how it is in most workplaces! (Notice, it said female WORKERS, and males. Draw your own conclusion about how stuff gets done.)

Second graders will find this interesting: An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight. I mean, you've seen them carrying cake crumbs the size of Joe Pesci! But if you second graders were as strong as ants, you would be able to lift a car! So give it up for the ants, unless you can lift a car.

While I was looking up stuff about ants (because I wanted to write about Ansan, a city in South Korea, but I didn't get far enough in the dictionary) I discovered that at one time on earth, the total weight of ants running around on earth equaled the total weight of people.

Entomologists  - or "bug experts" - figure there are at least one million trillion insects among us. One percent of them are ants. 

That comes to ten thousand trillion ants. 

2,000 years ago, Before the days when there was a froyo stand on every corner and people were less, uh, corpulent, if you had a giant scale, and had all the ants on one side and all the humans on the other, it would have balanced out perfectly, says Francis Ratnieks, professor of Apiculture at the University of Sussex.

Professor Ratnieks would probably agree, that would look silly, all those people stomping on all those ants.