‘Nuptial flight’ of ant swarms cause mess on metro Boston houses, cars

BOSTON — Bugs and summer: they’re a package deal. But what some Boston area residents experienced Monday night was nothing short of a “bugapalooza.”

“My friend came to pick me up and her car was just swarmed with bugs,” said Jayden Lassiter of Roslindale. “They were just, like, little black bugs, and they swarmed all over her car.”

Those little black bugs were actually ants. And the spectacle Monday night has a name.

“It’s called the nuptial flight, as in marriage, or the mating flight,” said Jeff Garnas, PhD, an associate professor in the University of New Hampshire’s Natural Resources and the Environment Department. “The goal of the mating flight is to get up and away from the colony you were born in and meet some males from a different colony or females if you’re a male.”

Garnas explained what seems inexplicable: that all ants are female until males are needed for reproduction. Those males, created by a process similar to cross-pollination, develop the wings required to participate in the mating flight. Their targets during that flight: female Queens, who retain their wings only long enough for insemination and subsequent relocation to form a new colony.

But back to the mating flight itself. Picture millions of flying ants in a sexual frenzy.

“It can be quite a mess, that mating flight,” said Garnas. “Females wind up being multiply mated by more than one male.”

And then there’s the romantic tragedy part of the ritual: the impregnated females fly off to start a new life, while all those males are left to die.

It’s an ecstatic few hours for the ants, but it leaves behind a mess for humans — with carcasses plastered on vehicles, grills, outdoor lights, and siding.

“All over my face, in my eyes, in my ears,” said David Bran of Jamaica Plain. “All over the cars. The worst I’ve ever seen all year, to be honest.”

But something never to be seen, in exactly the same way, again. For each love flight of the ants burns bright — but generally just for one night.

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