Ants

[BlueHeaven]

Do ants carry any sort of germs/diseases? This afternoon, my daughter left an empty fizzy drink can on the kitchen worktop and a bit later we noticed about 15 ants around the top of the can. We discovered they were coming in through a crack in the window frame. What should I have used to clean the worktop afterwards?

Also, the crack is barely even visible so I am amazed at how they knew to come through it when the can of drink was a good 8 feet away and the window is about 4 feet off the ground! How did they know it was there? Surely they couldn't smell it through a closed window?

[Rabelais]

Ants carry no zoonotic diseases, they are in fact very disease resistant and succumb only to a very few fungal infections and according to Cecil Adams.

"Ants groom themselves more than almost any other type of animal known. In this respect their feet are second in importance only to their antennae, which are immaculate.
The physical structure of ants' feet, and the nature of the lipid layer covering their exoskeleton, makes them a poor site for bacterial retention even if they didn't groom themselves so well.
The chemical secretions in ants' saliva and external glands are loaded with some remarkable antimicrobial agents--ants, after all, are assaulted by infectious agents in the environment just as we are."

So you are much filthier than they are

[lizwizz]

Ants can sniff out sweet things from miles away. We had a trail of ants from the front door, all the way through the house to the back where we kept our orange juice.

[WendyS]

Ants are very fond of sugary things and would have been attractedto the sweet residue of moisture which was probably left in the bottle and around the rim.