There is one afternoon every British summer when the air stops behaving. It is usually a Thursday, usually humid, usually just after you have decided to eat outside for once. The patio slabs start to shimmer, the gulls begin shrieking like they have seen something unspeakable, and then you notice the ants. Not the usual ones trundling along the skirting of the garden path, but airborne ones, thousands of them, rising out of the lawn like the ground itself has had enough.
Flying Ant Day. And your back door is wide open, because it is the hottest day of the year. Of course it is. That is rather the point.
What is actually going on out there
Despite the name, Flying Ant Day is not really a day. It is a rolling event that happens across the country whenever conditions line up, usually late-July, usually when the weather is warm, still and a bit muggy after rain. The black garden ants that have spent all year quietly ignoring you produce a generation of winged queens and males, and when the moment is right, every colony in the neighbourhood launches them at once. It is a mating flight, coordinated on a scale that would impress an air traffic controller.
The queens fly off, mate, drop their wings and go looking for somewhere to start a new colony. The males have a considerably shorter retirement. Seagulls eat so many that there are yearly reports of them wobbling about drunk on formic acid, which is one of the more cheerful facts British summer has to offer.
It lasts a few hours, perhaps an afternoon or two. But those are precisely the hours when you want the door open, because a still, muggy July day indoors with everything shut is its own kind of misery.
The open door dilemma
This is the seasonal bargain every British household strikes. Keep the door shut and swelter, or open it and accept whatever the garden sends in. Most of the year that is a bumblebee with no sense of direction and the odd bluebottle. On Flying Ant Day it is a small squadron of confused queens who mistake your kitchen for a promising nesting site.
A bead curtain sits rather neatly in the middle of that bargain. The doorway stays open, the air keeps moving, the kettle steam has somewhere to go, and there is now a gently clacking wall of beads between your kitchen and the airborne chaos. Flying ants are not skilled pilots. They are clumsy, short-lived and mostly interested in each other. A curtain of moving strands in the doorway is exactly the sort of obstacle they cannot be bothered to negotiate, so the great majority simply drift past and take their romance elsewhere.
An honest word about swarms
We will not pretend a bead curtain is an impenetrable force field. If a swarm kicks off two feet from your back step, a handful of ants may still blunder through the gaps, because on that particular afternoon they are blundering through everything, including your hair. Nothing short of a sealed door stops all of them, and a sealed door on the muggiest day of July is not a serious offer.
What a bead curtain does is turn an open invitation into a nuisance not worth the effort, on Flying Ant Day and every ordinary fly-bothered day either side of it. The swarm passes in an afternoon. The bluebottles, sadly, do not.
Ready before the first ant
Hanging one takes two small nails into the top of the door frame and about ten minutes, so there is genuinely nothing stopping you doing it the same week you think of it. Every curtain has two small metal hoops on the top rail, and panel pins are ideal. If your door surround is metal or UPVC, heavy-duty adhesive Velcro strips do the same job without a hammer.
The ants will pick their afternoon without consulting you. The only regret we ever hear is that people didn't sort the doorway out sooner.