"I have a lot of questions about this. It just looks bad.
Ok. It’s not that I don’t believe that we need to improve our way of doing things. We do. It’s in the way we are actually trying to improve. That’s what's bad. I think.
It’s true. Traditional aphid farming isn’t working anymore. We take too long and too much work to produce results. And the results are always something we are not sure of. When we touch the aphids wrongly, they spoil. When we carry them too long, they molt. When we don’t watch them carefully, bacteria get them. There are too many opportunities for mistakes. Actually, it has so many disadvantages that I can’t figure out any advantage worth mentioning at all. Except maybe for the fact that this is a method we are all used to and have been doing since the beginning.
So, as maybe all of us agree, traditional aphid farming is indeed bad. But why should aphid farming totally go? Why can’t we find any other way of farming aphids than the traditional way? Why can’t we improve it? Aphids, though tricky, still works. They are easily available, and everyone already knows a lot about them. I mean, why leave them altogether instantly when ants in other trees can farm them effectively? (Believe it or not.) Why is it not better to stay with local familiar aphids? Why can’t we, industrious resourceful ants that we are, find our own effective way of farming them?
Then there’s this whole idea of fungi farming. Which ant thought of that anyway? I often wonder if the Queen was really consulted about this, or if this is what She wants at all. Why in the termites’ rotten caves fungi farming? Come on. This is farming used by a colony thousands of meters from us, introduced by ants completely different from us. We don’t live the same way. We don’t eat the same food. We don’t even have the same problems. So, I don’t really get it why the drones keep on insisting this is what is best for us. Frankly, a lot of us don’t think so.
Fungi farming is hard work. Yeah, maybe chewing fungi is easier to do than suckling aphids. But it’s that part on actually making edible chewable fungi from leaves that concerns me. Can we really do it? Should we really do it? Can we choose the right leaves? Can we carry these leaves? Can all of us learn to process these leaves properly? Do we even eat fungi? We don’t know this for sure yet, and yet we are so bent on applying fungi farming to the entire colony. Why? Why shouldn’t we instead, like all new systems, carefully test this system first? Not just test it once and to a limited chamber in the colony, then pronouncing it right away as ‘the solution to the farming problem’. Test it many times in gradually increasing level of ways. See if it really fits. See which ways we can apply and which ones we can’t. Aren’t we risking too much in relying everything right away to a farming system we are not even sure of?
Come to think of it, why in the Queen’s name are we thinking like this: ‘Ok, guys. We can’t seem to perfect this aphid farming. What should we do?’ ‘Hey, I know, crap aphid farming! Let’s do fungi farming! Like those other ants way out there. And let’s try doing this on that season when we badly need food. Al-right!’
Isn’t that just strange?
A lot of questions. And you know what, maybe the real answers are far worse." - C
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