I was considering trimming this branch in my garden as it was growing quite large and shading the flowers underneath. It’s a good time to top off bushes and trees. With all the rain they’ll sprout new growth in like - seconds (it seems anyway). When I looked up, a clump of bugs lined the branches. But not one bug, several types. They were either duking it out or eating each other. Turns out they were helping each other.

Coco! I screamed, in a voice that was a little too excited.

Go get that book on animals! You know the one we’ve read like a billion times. Here’s those ants sucking the honey out of the other bug’s butt! Here’s that ant we read about!

I lifted Coco up to the branches and sure enough she agreed. Aphids at atop a bump, which was their nest. They had these long black and yellow antennas. Some were till making the nests and some were just there, brooding I guess. Behind several of the aphids was an ant. The ant was as big as the aphid. And sure enough, the ant was sucking honey out of the aphids behind.

Coco ran up to find her book. I get all tingly when we find a real-life example of something we’ve been studying. Coco looked in the index under chapter, Side by Side: Animals Who Help Each Other.

“Tiny green garden insects (these were a bigger cousin of the tiny version) called aphids make honey in their bodies from the plant juices they drink. Ants “milk” honeydew from the aphids almost like a farmer gets milk from a cow. Using it’s antennae, an ant gently strokes the back of the aphid. Out oozes a drop of delicious honeydew for the ant to sip.” The benefit for the aphid for putting up with being milked all the time (I can empathize after breastfeeding two kids!) is that the ant will protect the aphid from predators.

Every time the ant felt an attack coming on - even if it was just the wind - it would rear back, hoist up it’s antennas, and get ready for battle. I’ve been bitten by this ant, and I know it means business.

After explaining three billion things to my kids, it’s nice to see an actual example right in front of our eyes - and one that wasn’t set up in advance by “mommy trying to teach us something.” But here’s a secret: I’ll probably go out and check out those bugs a hundred times before the eggs are hatched and the group moves on. It’s like when I was a little girl and I’d lay on the dock. I’d peer through the cracks in the wood and watch the muscles stick their tongue out and move across the rocks. I could watch for hours. There’s something so mesmerizing, so simple, so just…just…right about it. I guess that’s whatt I’m looking at. And perhaps that’s what my children will learn.