Then she begins her journey searching for a suitable place to build her kingdom. Once the lady has collected the sperm, she too falls to the ground, but unless she breaks her back or neck or is eaten by one of a thousand things, she staggers to her legs and looks for a stone to rub on, cracking and shedding the wings she will never need again. Sperm which she keeps in a special place to use at her own discretion when there is need for another dark and singing cloud of ant folk mating in the air. Then he drops dead, having emptied his sperm into his lady-love.

Frenzied, he flied into the humming cloud to fight gravity and time in order to do, just once, the single thing he was born for. And when he did, when he joined a cloud of others one evening just before a summer storm, joined colonies from all over the world gathered fro the marriage flight, he knew at last what his wings were for. Once in life, this little Amazon trembled in the air waiting for a male to mount her. So she urges a sperm from the private womb where they were placed when she had her one, first and last copulation. When they are needed, it is deliberately done by the queen who surmises, by some four-million-year-old magic she is heiress to, that it is time. The life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are seldom produced.

So many to be born and fed, then found and buried. Almost all of them are women and there is so much to do - the work is literally endless. Straight ahead they marched, shamelessly single-minded, for soldier ants have no time for dreaming. “The hills below crouched on all fours under the weight of the rainforest where liana grew and soldier ants marched in formation.

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison