When you are an insect in a colony, you will be assigned a job at birth, and you spend your life fulfilling that job for the good of the colony. After all, they are family. If you are a honey ant, also called the honeypot ant, your one job may be as a storage jar. In a honey ant colony, certain newly-hatched ants are fed and groomed to store sweet nectar from plants. The forager ants collect the nectar in their abdomens and bring it home. They transfer it to a "replete," or storage ant, who then hangs from the ceiling until the nectar is needed, like when prey insects are scarce or the water dries up. Then they can feed the entire colony.
If they were bees, they'd built food storage tanks from wax. But the fact that the nectar is stored inside an ant doesn't deter other species from raiding them for that sweet, sweet liquid. These other species include honey badgers and humans. -via Laughing Squid
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