ants -- siafu?

Question

more information about Siafu -- ants in Africa

Answer 1

Anyone who has ever lived in Africa can tell you many stories about pinching ants. Pinching ants are called "siafu" in Swahili, the trade language of East Africa. They are also sometimes called safari ants. The pinching ants, sometimes erroneously called army ants, would come in columns maybe 12 inches wide and up to 200 feet long. When they reached a home, they would enter and swarm all over the inside of the house. They would eat everything in sight that moved. They eat very little regular food, but they would eat all mice, scorpions, spiders, etc. They kill and eat dogs and cats if they were trapped in the house also.
In the older times of missionary work, before poisons were available, the missionaries would simply move out and let the ants do their work. They would be done and move on in as little as two days, and when the missionaries moved back in, the house would be free of varmints for a long time.
When pinching ants get on you, they don't bite at once. The ants climb up inside your clothes, and you never feel them. They seem to give a signal, and suddenly they ALL start biting at once. They have huge pinchers, and they grab hold and don't let go.

Answer 2

They're actually also all blind but lay down a chemical trail to communicate. There are numerous species of driver ants. They only move about 20 meters, roughly 65 feet, per hour. This is logically because as a few dozen of the ants locate a burrowed insect and attack and eat in one spot of the advancing mass, and a few dozen more in a few dozen other spots, it slows the advance down some. They do not move at their top speed.

Answer 3

Driver ants in Africa ... very vicious species of ant that can pretty much "mow" over anything they wish ... a voracious type of ant that is relentless and does not distinguish what it attacks. They swarm a victim and bite it numerous times, killing it and taking it back to its temporary nest.

They are nocturnal hunters normally and are indiscriminate against whatever they hunt. They can attack much larger prey and bite in areas that most other ants would never crawl into (ex. ears, nasal passages). Colonies are extremely large (in the millions at times).

Answer 4

Siafu ni wadudu wanaotembea kwenye mistari, ni wakali na wanang'ata sana. Kumbuka hadidhi ya siafu na nyoka darasa la tatu. [e-mail]

Answer 5

they are mean