The tweet soon went viral with thousands of replies putting in, some more grounded in science than others.One of the prevailing theories on Twitter was that the ants were responding to oleic acid, a substance that is released when bees and ants die. He also dismissed the anthropomorphic efforts to describe the scene as a funeral, which no pest species is known to do.His analysis of the scene hews more to something hes seen lots of times and is typical among fire ants (though he could not identify the ants based on the tweeted images).” When fire ants come across a big chunky piece of food that they cant quickly bring off, they cover it so that over the next a number of hours and days, the ants can selectively remove pieces of that animal as a prey product,” McGlynn tells The Scientist.Many on Twitter did expect that the ants were hiding a food source, but improperly presumed the flowers were selected to mask the bees fragrance.
