Why do flying ant colonies all appear on approximately the same day?
In places like Africa where the temperature and humidity level remains just right day afer day, they just seem to go on and on swarming. You might be interested to hear what happened one early evening shortly before sunset, as we returned to our little house out there. It had screen doors at front and back, opposite each other, and as we approached from the back that evening, I commented on the brilliance of the low sun shining straight through the two screens, from front to back. But when we got near to the back screen door, we could see it was covered in flying ants trying to get through, under and around it. And against the low sunlight, we could see others flying around inside, thousands of them, and realised there was a swarm of flying ants inside. We walked round to the front and opened that screen and they just streamed out and swarmed away towards the light source. To deal with the ones stuck outside at the back, we just opened the back screen too and let them follow the rest.
