Australian Honeypot Ant

• GeneralSome workers fill with nectar until they look like grapes, and serve as a living larder.
• The repletes cannot move: they hang from the ceiling for months and regurgitate food to their nestmates when asked, with a tap of the antennae.
• They are a highly prized traditional food of the Aboriginal peoples of the Australian desert, who dig down as much as a metre to unearth the nests.
• Their role allows the colony to survive the long droughts of the Australian interior, where there may be no nectar for months.
• It has a caste of workers called repletes, which the rest feed with nectar until their abdomens swell to the size of a grape: they hang from the roof of the chamber and serve as living larders.
• The repletes make up almost half the colony: in two nests excavated in the Northern Territory they accounted for 49 % and 46 % of the population.
• The largest replete measured had an abdomen of 15 mm and weighed 1.4 g.
• It is a traditional Aboriginal food, called yarumpa or wuukurta, and forms part of the Tjukurpa; the Honey Ant Dreaming site lies in central Australia.
• A 2023 study found that its honey has a distinctive antimicrobial activity, different from that of bee honey.

Habitat & environment

Spinifex desert and arid scrub

Sources consulted: Conway (1991), The Australian Entomologist; Dong et al. (2023), PeerJ; Islam et al. (2022), Molecules