2 May—Before setting out to do my civic duty by voting in the Borough of Litchfield’s purely perfunctory (in this case, only because it’s required by law) uncontested write-in election yesterday, I rescued a little black ant who couldn’t find her way out of the kitchen sink. No ant is perfect.

I assume the little ant was female because it’s the girls who do all the work in and out of the hives in formic society and she didn’t have wings. In addition to being smaller than the females, male ants have wings, as well as longer antennae, which are their olfactory organs. But I didn’t bother to measure anything.

As is also often the case in human society, male ants—as well as bees and many other insects—are drones, non-workers, layabouts. A drone has only one job, to copulate—but only with his queen. In other words, he’s a royal stud. All the drones are royal studs. What a life.

And all the queen ants want is sperm. Since, as it’s been put by one authority, male ants function like flying sperm, it’s mutually advantageous, obviously win-win. The downside for the guys is that they have only one day to do their thing and usually meet their maker 10 to 14 days after having their way.

The queen ants, the only females with wings, fly around scouting out good studs. They’ll probably do their rumpy-pumpy with several studs from good families. But in only one wild spree. Then they shed and eat their wings. And even though the studs don’t live long, their sperm do. So queens, who literally become cloistered—and, of course, celibate—and never mate again after losing their virginity, store the sperm in convenient pouches until they decide to fertilize their eggs. Ant sperm have incredible longevity, so the queens and their attendants don’t need to freeze them.

Queen ants are egg factories. They ovulate to beat the band, some producing millions of eggs in their lifetimes, which may be 15 years, perhaps even three decades. The working girls, on the other hand, live only about a year, but can make it to seven years if they’re lucky. If you consider being slaves lucky. And that’s assuming predators don’t get them, of course.

Queen ants lay two types of eggs. Not white and brown. Unfertilized ant eggs develop into males—i.e., drones—and fertilized eggs develop into female workers and potential new queens. We won’t get into parthenogenesis, which has nothing to do with transgender ants.

When the hive queen dies, the working girls can start to lay eggs. But it’s not unusual for a hive to die shortly after the queen goes to her well-deserved rest beyond the pearly gates of pismire heaven.

Ants are remarkable. Have you ever watched one—obviously a female—moving a leaf or crumb many times her size?

When I got back from voting, I rescued a slug on the walk . . .