I want to warn you about my neighbour Steve, who's slightly disturbed. He has this ant experiment. This is how it works:

Steve built an artificial anthill in his back garden (it took him six days, then he had a rest). He filled it with all sorts of insects, and plants, and his special ants, which he bred from a single pair.

He's also set up a beautiful glass ant paradise world in his living room, and a huge metal crate balanced on his barbecue outside, which he keeps always turned on.

When an ant is a couple of weeks old, he takes it off the anthill and decides whether to put it in his lovely ant home, or in the metal crate. The crate's agonising, but not hot enough to actually kill the ants, so essentially it tortures them for what feels like an eternity. If Steve thinks ants have been bad, he puts them on the barbecue.

When he first built the anthill, he was talking to the ants and interacting with them all the time, helping his favourites and sticking huge families of bad ants in the crate. But recently he's been staying hidden, just watching and poking sticks in occasionally.

Now different groups of ants have got confused, and think someone else made their anthill. So when they get old, Steve tortures them on the barbecue. Some ants say the anthill might just be a natural formation - Steve puts them on the barbecue too. He could just stick his face in and say "Hello", and then all the ants would go to the nice place, but that doesn't fit in with his secret plans.

Then there's the other stuff...

Once Steve got angry, and decided nearly all the ants were bad, so he put the only good ant family, with some of the other insects, on a leaf. Then he stuck a hose in, turned the tap on, and went on holiday for a month. Of course, the millions of insects and ants that were washed out didn't die, he threw them all on the barbecue.

Then Steve's little son, Joe came to stay. Joe disguised one of his fingers as an ant and stuck it in the ant nest. He did tricks to impress the ants, to get their attention and tell them all to be more peaceful.

But Steve wasn't happy. He decided the ants were still bad, so he let some of the ants bite off his son's finger. It was unbelievable, Joe was crying, saying "Dad, dad, why have you left me like this?"

Luckily the doctors sewed it back on, so three days later, Joe was able to stick his finger back in the nest to show the ants he was OK. Then he went to live in the house, and hasn't been back. The ants have felt guilty ever since.

I feel really sorry for those ants. For some reason they think Steve loves them, but he's actually really malicious. He sits out there, watching them constantly, and then sets up terrible, sickening disasters and illnesses for the poor little creatures. When they beg him for help, he ignores them - he just sits watching. Always watching. No-one really knows what he's doing or why he's doing it. I'm not sure it will ever make sense.

The funny thing about all this is that I've got an anthill in my back garden too. But this one grew up on it's own (which personally I think is far more miraculous than Steve's artificial hill). The ants know they all helped create their world by themselves, so they never fight each other over who made them, like Steve's do. They don't need constant threats of torture to be kind to one another. They know that sometimes there are thunderstorms, and sometimes there's sun, and those things are pretty much out of their control. But strangely, in spite of that, my ants seem to be far, far happier than Steve's.