Advice from the Lovely Margaret

The Red Ant is one of the commonest and there are eight species of them here in the UK.

Their sting is the piercing type and can be painful.

Colonies of 100 to 300 can be found under stones and paving or sometimes rotting tree trunks, in most gardens, which is where Margaret was, doing some weeding by hand, when she uncovered a nest of red ants, and dropped the weed, and retired from the area - too late though. As you can see by the picture above, of the bite she received, the incision and poison still in her leg, after about 6 weeks of her being bitten!

“I felt nothing at the time, but later when I went to work, it felt hot, and I noticed a small swelling, that grew in severity of pain as time went by, and I began to feel bilious and unwell.

When I got home, I had stomach pains and was sick.

The swelling got bigger and more painful, and the poison spread widely, eventually I went to the medical centre, and discovered it was due to a Red Ant bite!