The Ant Farm

I nearly forgot to mention the ant farm I received when I was eleven or twelve. I mailed in the certificate for my ants, and when they arrived in the mail my dad and I got ready to place them in their new home. We followed the printed instructions, putting the ants in the fridge for a while to calm them down before transferring them from the vial to their new home. After we took them out of the fridge we moved downstairs to my room for the rest of the procedure. I'm a little fuzzy on this part of the story, but I think we had to finish assembling the ant farm itself and by the time I started pouring them into the farm they had warmed up sufficiently to crawl up the outside of the tube and onto my fingers. The ants that are shipped out for ant farms are called Harvester ants, and they have stingers. I got stung and bitten, most painfully was a stinger lodged underneath the fingernail on my index finger. I recall that it was quite painful. My dad told me to man up and we finished dumping the ants into the habitat, although in the process he also received some bites and stings from the ants. Now the reality of it all set in and he spent much of the evening on the couch upstairs proclaiming how much it hurt and soliciting my mother for the healing power of ice cream in a bowl. I don't remember if I got any ice cream, but my finger was numb for a day or so, and the ant farm was pretty neat to watch once the ant were locked in and got to work building their tunnels.

For those who don't make it down into the comments, here is my dad's take on the event:

They bit us on the end of our index finger. It was excruciating pain for hours. I had been bit by ants before and it wasn't a big deal, which is why I told you to man up. We had a good laugh about how I got my come-uppance - after the pain wore off.