I was pleased to see such a high incidence of individualism; although limited, that capacity for transgression made me feel hopeful about the future of ants, a domain of Nature whose societal model had seemed as perfect, absolute and mechanical as that of bees; a model in which the individual counts for nothing. And what became of the individualist transgressors? If you ask me, they got drunk on sugar and had a wild night of hedonism and sexual excess. That’s my opinion. But in fact, what I saw that night by artificial light was a group of ants forming more little black balls. When man, i.e. me, intervened with his twig, they separated with some difficulty, moving slowly and clumsily and never straying too far from the centre of the gathering; not a single ant took hold of another ant’s leg; and at the centre of the gathering was invariably an ant of the same type but with a slightly smaller body. Man went further; he separated two ants from the group and put them on the table. They stayed there for some time, walking around in rather listless circles, looking disoriented and not showing much flight reflex when man goaded them with a stick. The next day, there were no ant corpses to be seen; and neither, oddly, did a single ant take any notice of my bait. They were all busy with their usual tasks.