Ants are very sophisticated beings, as one Newforma employee has observed:

“Let’s just say I spent MANY HOURS watching them one evening, in the dark, with a flashlight, and it was VERY interesting.  This team worked at night and didn’t start till around midnight… so my investigation began at midnight and carried through till about 3am… for three evenings straight… I went through a few batteries in my flashlight as well…

Anyways… There were a bunch of determined ants who had apparently (prior to our purchasing the house) owned a few shingles of our house to keep their young…
I, on the other hand, was determined to find where their nest was because they were insistent upon bringing their eggs up onto our deck and into the siding.  The week prior…I did all sorts of things like spray the driveway, put a line of chalk on the driveway, basically anything to do to change the route they had planned (they are very good planners; I could almost see them out there holding their blueprints )…. I took a few of them out and it really put the delay into their sequence… but they regained their composure and hired new ants almost immediately for those roles and they were back in business… certain ants had certain jobs.. it was almost like they were holding flags and directing traffic… some were egg carriers, some were watching the corners… they did NOT go in a straight line… the zig-zag route that I ended up following, hunched over, almost 100+ feet away was amazing… over leaves, around rocks, over the stone wall… after much determination over a 3 day period of evenings being out there… I finally found the nest in a huge maple tree about 6 feet up out in the forest!  Of course, I had to overturn their operation, and they did not return that season, but they re-grouped the next Fall and appeared again, this time in a different tree in the other direction.  Now that I was onto their scheme, I was able to locate the nest very quickly … but I did learn a lot about ants and was very impressed with their teamwork, work ethic, roles, amount of weight they could carry etc.  Actually makes me think twice now before I step on one….”