Yes, big bastards that weigh in heavily when they land on you.
Very pretty though. They sparkle in the sun.
They also make a weird clicking sound as they move their legs. I once was stung, "and it hurt" but I devoted a lot of my time to payback. I used them as target practice once I had my first BB gun.
I once, many years later captured one and got it into a small plastic bag. After a satisfying degree of torture I took it to where I knew was a very large red ant bed and thought I would just released it, but not before letting it lay there inside the plastic bag in abject terror while the ants called to each other and surrounded the bag, tried to move the entire bag into the nest. It was like some kind of telepathy I had witnessed. As soon as I got within five feet of the ant bed, the ants began to become very agitated and the hornet was as well, ramping up his attempts to find his way out of the torture bag in which he was captive. I finally had enjoyed myself enough watching this NEW spectacle and dangered my fingers as I ripped open the side of the plastic bag and those half inch long ants tried to rush in to take their enemy.
Of course a life and death struggle began and the huge hornet did his best, but I had already given the ants an advantage by fucking up this hornet quite a bit and he was still contained inside the bag, unable to just fly away. As the next thirty minutes unfolded many of the the ants were cut in half by the sheer power of the big guy's jaws, but numbers began to overwhelm the huge hornet and finally the massive swarm of ants managed to struggle this huge hornet out of the bag, cut his wings off and four of his legs. He was not going down easy, though as he continued to sever every ant body that got near his jaws as he gnashed about and slew his enemies one at a time. But there were just too many. I had planned this torture to the death, but it turned out even better than I had imagined.
It took over thirty minutes and I was mesmerized the whole time as these one tenth the size army warrior ants methodically dismembered and finally defeated this giant enemy, who had probably taken a few of them in his career, was defeated and taken in pieces down into the ants' lair to be further broken up, chewed up and finally spit out and fed to the children.
