How Overcoming Difficulties Improves The Quality Of Life - The Story Of The Ant

Nelson Mandela, after 27 years in prison, became the president of South Africa.

Life is beautiful, but the different philosophies and ideas of men that keep changing the world make things difficult for us sometimes. Many want to become rich or famous at all costs; therefore, they take the wrong turn in life and pay heavily for their crimes, while those on the right path of perseverance to success often give up because they find it too tough to handle.

I see people who give up in life very easily as weak and lazy. In the early nineties, I was among the few Africans in Rome, Italy. We only eat at the Caritas charity, but there is no place to sleep. Where to lay your head in Rome was one of the toughest issues of being an illegal immigrant in Italy.

Many of my African friends return to Africa. I refused to leave; I stayed behind, sleeping every night at the central train station in Rome. Today, here I am still in Europe and now with documents. 

Why, as a human being, do you have to give up when a small insect, an ant, never gives up in whatever it does?

Here is the story of the ant.

In reality, the intelligence of a man is above any animal or insect, but examining the effectiveness of certain insects, such as a bee and an ant, we can’t dispute the fact that the most intelligent insect can rightly be considered an ant, because it is one of the few hard-working social insects.

 

Ants gather in large groups and accept smaller colonies to be slaves. They are intelligent creatures to navigate their environment and the weather.  They go to war against each other and know how to protect and defend themselves by using tactics and strategies.

 

According to a study, the ants know how to heal themselves.  The ant, infected with the spores of the parasite fungus, transfers to the healthy ants a small number of spores, which is not enough for a full infection but strengthens their immune system.

 

The body temperature of ants changes in response to the atmospheric temperature. In winter, their body temperature falls so greatly that their movements inevitably grow sluggish. Therefore, they hibernate restlessly in relatively warm places, such as the soil or under the bark of trees.

 

The hard-working insect ant

Depending on the environmental conditions, there can be several queens in the anthill, polygamy, or monogamy. There may be several ants that act as the queen and often arrange fights among themselves, trying to hit each other with their antennae. 

 

Such fights do not cause significant damage to the females; however, the working ants watching them make their choice in favor of one of them, after which they kill the rest.  

 

Ants can communicate by explaining to each other the path to food; they can count and perform simple arithmetic operations. 

 

For example, when a scout ant finds food in a specially designed maze, they return and explain how to get to it to other ants.  If you remove the pheromone trace at this time, the relatives of the scout will still find food. 

 

In another experiment, a scout searches the labyrinth of many identical branches, and after communication, other insects immediately run to the indicated branch.  

 

Ants communicate using odors because their glands produce pheromones in different concentrations for different messages. 

 

If an ant stumbles upon its own pheromone trail, the insect will walk in a circle until it is completely exhausted; condemned to this fate, its brethren will follow its trail.  This phenomenon is called an ant-hill, the spiral of death, a carousel of death, or ant circles.

 

For the reason that ants communicate with smells, they cannot distinguish between a dead and a living ant.  They understand the difference only when the dead begin to decompose.

 

However, not all ants have a permanent residence.  There are roving ants.  They live in the tropics of Africa, as well as in Central and South America.  Sometimes African roving ants come together in huge colonies of up to twenty million, and usually, they move very fast. 

 

It is very interesting to observe how roving nomadic ants move.  They look like a living river flowing in a direction known only to them. When they meet a large pool, they stick to each other to form a bridge and cross over.

 

Such a column of nomads stretches on average up to one or two meters.  When staying for the night, the queen, together with the larvae, remains in the center, and the remaining ants, clinging to each other with their paws, form a large ball, approximately one meter in diameter.

If such a tiny insect as an ant can work so hard to survive both summer and winter, why would you call it quits if you encounter problems in your life? 

It is not how many times you fall in life but how many times you make efforts to stand on your feet. Never give up as a human being in whatever good thing you want to achieve in your life until the bones are rotten.