The diligent ant; This stems mainly from a fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper, in which the ant works hard to prepare for the winter while the grasshopper wastes the summer and fall having fun, only to have to beg food from the ant or starve. The story has been used to teach the virtues of hard work and the perils of improvidence. Some versions state a moral at the end along the lines of "Idleness brings want," "To work today is to eat tomorrow," "Beware of winter before it comes." In La Fontaine's Fables no final judgment is made, although it has been argued that the author is there making sly fun of his own notoriously improvident ways.

The setting for the story is an ant colony in Central Park in New York City, over the span of four days. The protagonist is "Z," a neurotic and individualistic worker ant living in a wholly totalitarian society who longs for the opportunity to truly express himself. His friends include fellow worker Azteca and a soldier ant, Weaver. Z meets Princess Bala at a bar where she goes to escape from her suffocating royal life and falls in love with her. In order to see Bala again, Z exchanges places with Weaver and joins the army. He marches with the ranks, befriending a staff sergeant named Barbatus in the process. He doesn't realize that the army's leader and Bala's fiance, General Mandible, is secretly sending all the soldiers loyal to the Queen to die so he can begin to build a colony filled with powerful ants.