What do Tiny Ants do for Flowers and Plants in the Spring?

I love the garden in my backyard!

The perennials in our front garden

The perennials  I planted years ago in my garden are blooming year after year

In my younger days, I used to spend a lot of time digging, moving and planting in my gardens during the warmer season.




















I planted a few peony shrubs years ago in my garden. Every year around the beginning of June, we look forward to seeing the bright pink flowers blooming and gracing our garden.

After a few blooms appear on the plants, I would snip a few flowers along with some buds and bring them into the house. I thought after the blooms wilt, the buds would bloom giving me fresh new flowers.

While the buds continued to bloom in my garden outside, those buds I brought inside to the house
never bloomed at all.

I wondered about this for many years. I finally got my answer this spring.  One fine afternoon a couple of weeks ago, while admiring the many buds on the peony shrubs and thinking how beautiful my garden would look when these buds start blooming into gorgeous pink flowers,
I noticed for the first time there were numerous ants crawling all over the peony buds.

I found ants working hard on most of the buds on our peony shrubs.

Ants work hard to help open the petals of the bud into blooms 

As I looked more carefully, I discovered that  every unbloomed bud in the garden was a hot bed of activity for these ants. These ants were busy at doing something.

Their presence on those peony buds was not a coincidence. There was a real purpose for the ants' busy activities.

We enjoyed these beautiful peonies in our garden year after year

For after a few days, the buds, which were visited by ants a few days earlier, started to open up turning into beautiful pink flowers on the stems.

Like bees which  are needed for pollination of flowers and plants, tiny little ants are just as important and have their unique propose in mother nature.

Without their handwork, the peonies in my garden will not bloom. This was the reason why the snipped buds brought into my house did not bloom into flowers as they were devoid of the essential work performed by the ants in my garden.

Little insects like ants help flowers bloom in our beautiful garden

I learned a lesson about what ants do to our flowers and have a renew sense of appreciation for little insects running about in our garden.

R.T.
Toronto