On this day, after experiencing a brief late spring cold a few days ago, the ant miners, who had taken a break, came to the Golden Beach to work in pairs again.
The miners are organized into teams according to the military establishment, each team has 50 ants, and an older miner serves as the foreman. By the way, the non-big-headed ants among the miners are very unaccustomed to this non-sex system, but when they start working, they don't care about it anymore.
Unlike the herdsmen who need overseers to prevent stealing, the valuable sand gold is useless to a single ant, so each team of miners can freely arrange their own work plan under the command of the foreman.
The team of miners in front of them had finished their first round of work in the morning and were resting on a high stone platform. The ant foreman patrolled back and forth, touching the carapace of each miner in the team with his tentacles. After confirming that they had all warmed up in the sun and had eaten the allotted snacks, he notified everyone to start work again.
Whether they were professional ant miners or ant slaves, they immediately lined up in two lines tamely, climbed down the edge of the stone platform, and stepped onto the cold and wet river beach with their six limbs.
They lined up and walked to the depths of the beach. The places where the waves of the river repeatedly hit the land often contain the most sand gold. However, it is also very dangerous there. Not only is it more humid and cold, but you will be swept away by the river waves if you are not careful. .
Most miners still prefer to search in relatively safe places. Only the most experienced old miners have the ability to quickly mine in the few seconds when the previous wave has just receded and the new wave has not yet come up. Rush over to explore and come back quickly. If you find sand gold, you may need to go back and forth several times to get the sand gold back to the shore. But even if it is so troublesome, the return of this risky behavior is higher than aimlessly searching on the river beach.
For miners, the more sand gold an individual ant collects and the more sand gold the entire team collects, the more extra rewards they can get in addition to the material quota, in order to meet the body's demand for honeydew and high-protein food. , veteran miners don’t mind taking a little more controllable risk.
Look, the big-headed worker ant miner who is expected to take over when the current foreman retires is moving back and forth quickly like dancing and surfing by the river. After a while, he brings back a grain that has obviously just been washed by the river. Sand gold coming up.
But she seemed to be unlucky today. After the first grain of sand gold, there was no new harvest for a while. Fortunately, there is not much discouragement in the simple minds of the ants, and the big-headed ant miner continues his performance.
Not long after, she had no choice but to retreat, because in the area that the miner team was responsible for, an "uninvited guest" floated on the river.
On the first-class spring water where the ice has completely melted, in addition to the rippling blue waves, there are also many debris, such as floating branches and leaves, mud mixed with foam in the water, and occasionally the corpses of some insects.
Those particularly large floating objects sometimes pose an additional threat to the ants working on the river beach, forcing them to temporarily abandon a certain beach. But sometimes some floating objects can also act as breakwaters.
Not far from the river facing our team, there are several thicker driftwoods stranded near the shore, forming a natural breakwater, making the surge here much smaller than elsewhere. , this is also a point that bold miners can rely on.
But now, there is a round, dark thing floating from the river, crossing the breakwater, and heading directly towards the river beach. If you don't avoid it, you may be hit by the drifting objects.
Warned by the foreman's screeching sound, the miners put down their work and avoided the position where the black floating object was rushing to the beach. After it ran aground, they gathered around it out of curiosity.
It turned out to be a walnut fruit.
There are no walnut trees in the unit of [Golden Beach City], and there are no walnut trees growing on the bank within a short distance upstream of the Qinghe River. This walnut fruit may have drifted from a farther place, such as the woods over the Leafcutter Ant Country. . This walnut must have been drifting for a long time. The outer pulp layer of the walnut has been soaked and eroded, and a layer of black slurry is adhered to it when touched. The lines on the walnut shell have been exposed in many places.
The miners were not interested in walnuts, but they still put the walnuts on ropes and pulled them ashore so as not to affect their work. At the same time, they handed the walnut fruit to the nest for disposal.
After a while, some nurse ants came from the nest, as well as three big-headed ant warriors equipped with jaw knives. They arrived under the leadership of a king.
These ants were sent as guest collectors by the king of the nest who got the news. The king planned to take out the kernels from the walnuts and make a high-calorie snack for the residents of the nest.
Because of the terrain, the ants in [Golden Beach City] can often pick up some strange floating objects. Some of the floating objects are actually harvested, so the ants here are used to searching for the floating objects they catch. .
Nice romance
Ants in the Ant Alliance are no strangers to walnuts. After all, making and driving walnut boats is a unique skill of the Ant Alliance. Ordinary ants may be disappointed by the strong walnut shells, but educated ant nobles all know how to open walnut boats. Walnut method.
The king of the big-headed male ants looked around, then led the ants to find the location of the navel, and then ordered the soldier ants to dig from here. The navel is the most fragile part of the entire walnut shell. Especially after being soaked in water for a long time, it will become softer and easier to dig. Of course, if you wait until the walnuts sprout and pull out the buds, there will be ready-made holes available, but the ants generally will not wait. Too much edible nutrients will be lost in the sprouted walnuts, and they cannot be used to make walnuts. Boat.
As expected, the three soldier ants dug smoothly. The iron jaw knives dug in like cutting tofu with such ease that even the experienced king was surprised.
Soon a large enough hole was dug out in the walnut navel. It was too dark to see clearly due to the backlight. A pavement ant worker ant got in first, and soon the whole body disappeared, followed closely by a big-headed soldier ant. The whole thing went in.
Wang shook his head. This was a habitual action learned from the great envoy Wang Na, expressing disappointment and pity. Judging from the ease with which the ants got in, the walnut kernels inside might have shrunk. , which means it is no longer edible. It seems that this time the work was in vain.
But just when Wang thought of this, he saw the ant that had got in hurriedly retreated out and came straight towards him, waving its tentacles in a panic, as if it had made some important discovery!
