Hello and welcome to Crowdscience from the BBC World Service.
I'm Anand Jagatia and to get us started this week,
I want to take you back to the middle of summer 2025.
It is a lovely warm day, just a little bit of moisture in the air,
nice and humid, very pleasant day.
Where I am in the UK, people are enjoying the sunshine.
I planned a big family barbecue, loads of us round at my house and it had all the food prepared,
ready to go out and start cooking.
But, undernourished to many of them, a swamp is about to emerge.
What I didn't know that day is that the weather was going to be all about the ants.
A nice flying ant situation happening in our garden right now.
This appears to be the epicentre.
It was flying ant day, so that was a nice surprise Yep,
it's flying ant day which is when thousands upon thousands of winged ants emerge from their nests as part of a huge mating ritual At first you think it's just one fly and then you realize that actually you are being completely attacked from all directions Despite the name,
it's not actually a single day.
But for a couple of weeks in June or July,
you can see ants taking to the skies, ruining picnics wherever they go.
Oh, this isn't going to work.
Lots of kids, lots of family members trying to eat whilst these little bugs flying around us.
But it's not all bad.