Deep inside their underground nest,  honeypot ants are stuffing their own kin.

The glistening globes hanging from the  ceiling are actually part of the ants’ bodies.

These portly ants are known as repletes.

The elixir inside them will nourish  the colony when food is scarce   in the ants’ arid homelands  in the Southwest and Mexico.

To feed a hungry nestmate, a plump replete   opens its mandibles wide and regurgitates a  tiny droplet that the other one slurps up.

As the liquid drains, the ant’s belly deflates.

The whole thing happens while the replete  is hanging by the tips of its legs.

So how do these ants become living storage tanks?

It all starts with this giantess – the  queen.

All these workers are her daughters.

She lays thousands of tiny white eggs.

Workers tend to them as they grow into squirming  larvae … and then pupae wrapped in fuzzy cocoons.

They choose the biggest newborns to  stuff until they swell into repletes.

To fill them up, workers venture out at night  to forage.

Dead insects provide protein and fat.

Desert plants give them sweet nectar.

Or dinner might be red artificial nectar,  if a human is keeping the ants as pets.

Workers carry the nectar back.

And they  feed it, drop by drop, to their sisters,   the ones they’re turning into repletes.

They make up about one fifth of the colony.

The nectar flows into a pouch called the  crop.

The crop will swell into a storage tank  because valves prevent most of the  liquid from flowing into the stomach,   where it would be digested.

As their belly grows, this flexible membrane   stretches.

The hard sclerites  that protect the ant’s abdomen   move away from one another, until they end  up like a chain of islands on a tiny planet.

Suspending themselves allows the air to circulate  around them, maybe preventing a fungi attack.

To our human eyes, these living  chandeliers might seem like captives,   hanging in the dark for weeks or months.

Or it might look like they have it easy, just  chilling while droplets are lovingly delivered.

The truth is that every worker  in a colony has a key job.

And all of them, even a replete in its cozy home,  can face a sudden demise … by a badger that digs   up the nest … or someone delighting in a special  treat, as humans have done for thousands of years.

Gabriela: Mmm.