#alates

Anyone know what this is? I’m guessing it’s a Psenulus but I can’t find a similar species:/

Also considering Hemiteles (Ichneumonidae)

Flying Ant Day, Ireland

Rain fly refers to the mass emergence of winged reproductive insects, most commonly termites, triggered by rainfall and essential for ecosystem balance and species survival. This phenomenon is most visible in tropical and subtropical regions where humidity and soil conditions align after heavy rain. These insects are not random swarms but highly synchronised reproductive events governed by…

The answer: when their preferred crops become scarce, aphids produce alates, a winged and highly mobile form of the insect (if you’ve seen winged carpenter ants, those are alates). These winged members will travel to new host plants of the same type, or to the secondary host plant when their primary food becomes unavailable.

A year divides three hundred and sixty five

But not one division has a passion for me

And whether heat or cold may come

My loins maintain this temperate constancy

And nothing can break upon this surety

Not more time, or hope, or opportunity

But the ants they are another matter

Their subterranean labyrinth erupts

In an orgasm of fertilities cornucopia

It ejaculates alates by the thousand

Expulsive fruition of slavish devotion

They weave in amber lines across dusk

And approach me like their progenitor

Then they are gone into supple night

To make their trysts under the stars

Amber satyrs of one consensual feast

Then as the searchlight of day fails

Sated they slip into cracks of their doom

A prison to hold them captive forever