The Lost Message

For as long as anyone remembers, the ant has had a great many enemies, and because ants are small and do damage, huge numbers of them have been killed. Most of the birds hunted them. Anteater lived almost entirely on them. And Centipede attacked them whenever and wherever he got the chance.

So a few of the ants thought it would be wise to hold a council and try to agree on some plan: a safe place they could all retreat to whenever robber birds and animals came after them.

But when they met, their opinions clashed so badly that they could not decide anything.

Red-ant was there, and Rice-ant, Black-ant, Wagtail-ant, Gray-ant, Shining-ant and many more. The debate was a real babble of different voices. It went on and on and came to nothing.

Some wanted everyone to move into a little hole in the ground and live there. Others wanted a big, strong house built above the ground, which nobody but an ant could get into. Another group wanted to live in the trees to get away from Anteater, quite forgetting that the birds would catch them there. And yet another group seemed to want wings so that they could fly.

As I said, all this talk led nowhere, and each party decided to go its own way and look after itself.

Within each group, mind you, you would not find better teamwork anywhere in the world. Every ant had its job and did it steadily and well, and they all worked together. Some of the groups chose a king for themselves, and they shared out the work so that everything ran as smoothly as it possibly could.

But each group did things its own way, and not one of them thought about how to protect itself from the birds or from Anteater.

The Red-ants built their house on the ground and lived beneath it, but Anteater flattened in a minute what had taken them days of hard work. The Rice-ants lived underground, and they fared no better, because every time they came out, Anteater paid them a visit and carried them off, bag and baggage. The Wagtail-ants escaped into the trees, but Centipede was often sitting there waiting for them, or else the birds snapped them up. The Gray-ants had hoped to escape destruction by flying away, but that did them no good either, because Lizard, Hunting-spider and the birds were all much quicker than they were.

When the Insect-king heard that the ants could not agree, he sent them the secret of unity, the message of Work-together. Sadly, he chose Beetle as his messenger, and Beetle has still not reached the ants. That is why, even today, ants are the very picture of disagreement, and so their enemies still prey on them.

About this tale

“The Lost Message” is from James A. Honey’s South-African Folk-Tales (1910), where it is one of the first stories in the book. Honey writes that he began collecting his tales about ten years earlier, partly because he feared South Africa’s rapid changes would sweep the old stories away.

The tale’s point is a careful one: each kind of ant works together perfectly inside its own group, yet the groups never agree with one another, and the slow messenger means the cure never arrives.

Read the original: Honey’s 1910 South-African Folk-Tales on Project Gutenberg

Best for ages 6–8 — a gentle “why” story about teamwork, good for talking about cooperation.

Working hard on the wrong-sized problem

Each group organises its own work, yet none solves the shared problem of predators. The failed council is therefore not a story about lazy ants: effort is abundant, but coordination between groups is missing. The late messenger adds a final frustration, since useful advice cannot help if it never arrives. These speaking ant factions are fictional characters, not a scientific description of ant colonies.

Reopen the council

Choose two proposed shelters and identify one danger each fails to address. Draft a joint plan in which groups share information, then choose a messenger and explain how they would check that the message arrived.

Questions to ask

• What different plans did the ants suggest at their council?
• Why didn’t the hard work of each group keep them safe?
• Why do you think the Insect-king’s choice of messenger mattered so much?

You may also like

• Why We See Ants Carrying Bundles As Big As Themselves — a West African tale about why ants behave as they do
• Why White Ants Always Harm Man’S Property — another ant origin story
• The Judgment of Baboon — animals who cannot agree