Colony 33 φ
"Эדתܒ ޒठသ? Эדᛘתܒ ޒသ? ....?"
P tilted her head slightly, nudging the symbols into place correctly. Oh, this was about the paper strips again. New ones had appeared while she and the rest of her gathering group had taken a break. P pushed some of the debris that had rolled into her resting nest back over the small ledge that made up its entrance and crawled through the tunnel outside. In roughly equal distances, long paper strips reached into the air and over the glass, where it was wedged in between the wall and the lid. P took a sample of the strip. Making distinctions between papers, and even between paper and leaves categorically, had a recent development for her colony, but it helped with finding food. In her lifetime, the colony had exploded into twice or three times its size, most probably helped by the emergence of longer-lived workers. She herself was one of said workers, well into her second regular lifespan. The particular strip of paper she had sampled was of the rougher variety. There were traces of fat around the bottom, not inedible, but certainly not the point. P backed up from the paper and circled to the other side. P wasn't alone in this. A number of her colleagues were looking up, chattering about what they could see. There were eight of them in total, not enough to get any single one of them up the strip. P joined them, introduced herself and slowly walked back into the small cluster that had formed. The ones in the group had partially deciphered the message on the paper.
"...ps ....ps.... ft.... ees.... ps.....ps.... ft" so it went from everywhere. P herself couldn't see as high up as some of her colleagues, so "...ps" was all she could make out. The symbols crawling up the paper had a strange regularity to them that had only recently made itself legible to them. It was, like whoever had written them down had no regard for detail. It clearly wasn't an ideal method of communication either. Herself and most of her peers had to run up the paper to even see all of the symbols. With time, a whole sea of chattering and clicking had amassed itself behind her, enough to send somebody up.Somebody had made a similar observation and "let's go" rippled through the cluster of bodies like a wave. P went with the crowd, holding onto the one in front of her and feeling others grab hold of her in turn. The strain that had started as noticable was distributed slowly along countless other bodies until it was barely there.
It didn't take long for somebody to have climbed enough of the paper to bring back the message. It too, traveled down the mass of bodies rapidly. Some of the stragglers that hadn't found a place in the ladder were already leaving with it, following the directions. "Right seventy steps, left 50 steps! Right seventy steps, left 50 steps!"
The chattering dissolved into noise as the structure dissolved back into a sea of bodies, traveling the steps. P had worked out a better way not long ago. She tapped the one to the right of her, then the one to the left, both of which did something similar, until there were many many faces looking up to where she was headed. She took five steps to the left, seven steps to the right, glanced at the spot where she had started, turned around and followed the straight line straight to the destination.
Dr. Hill peered over the edge of the terrarium in Lab 33. Several of lab 33's ant colonies had been what his colleagues referred to as "undeniable failures". The 16. one however, Colony 33 φ, had a habit of displaying non-normal behavior. The hours upon hours of camera footage displayed long times of inactivity, followed by bursts of movements by large worker ant groups. It didn't make them any faster at food acquisition, so he wasn't really going to classify 33 φ as a success yet. His notes on the scented paper strips he placed into the terrarium had started disappearing as some of the ants took it apart. As long as he kept more space at the bottom though, it wasn't too much of an issue for the assistants to decipher his scrawly handwriting. A glance at the calendar reminded him of the deadline for the project that evening. He gave a stifled sigh of frustration and lifted terrarium 33 φ off the shelf. It was probably time to return these colonies to the wild.