At around 11:30 p.m. yesterday I was disappointed to discover that ants had invaded my coffee sugar. These creatures always seem to amaze me on Discovery Channel when they show them in the jungle chopping down trees, eating big birds, or latching onto each other to make themselves into a big bridge so that the others can cross over them. An equally entertaining documentary on ants might take place in my kitchen where they continue to impress me with their ingenuity. On several occasions I have sealed up things in my kitchen that might attract ants thinking that there would be no way they could get through the seal. And on several occasions I was proved wrong. I wrote it off as just one of the negatives of living in the tropics. Other negatives include cliffhanger style toilets and high import duty on cheese. How was it that I was being outsmarted by these little creatures? the answer is that I never bothered to think things through. I just took the easy way out and started storing my ant attracting condiments like honey, sugar, and Rice Krispy’s in the refrigerator where even if they could get inside the cold temperature would impede their success by making them slow and lethargic. But then, I got lucky. They got careless. Instead of just taking what was necessary when they absolutely needed it they got greedy and took chances they didn’t need to. Exactly how they were able to get inside my condiments had always been a mystery to me; a mystery to me until I caught them red-handed penetrating my coffee sugar jar. You see there is one small difference between this coffee sugar jar and all the rest of the condiment jars; the entire thing is transparent. Before my very eyes were several hundred ants filing their way into my sugar jar giving away their biggest secret. There they were marching one after another around and around the jar following the “threading” patiently until they had successfully threaded themselves all the way into the sea of sugar. I thought to myself “those little bastards; so that’s how they do it.”