The Ant and the Grasshopper

The story

All summer long, a grasshopper hopped through the long grass, singing and playing his fiddle in the warm sunshine. He ate whenever he was hungry, and there was always plenty around.

Nearby, an ant was busy all day. She dragged grains of wheat and seeds back to her nest, one at a time, again and again. “Why work so hard?” laughed the grasshopper. “Come and sing with me! There’s food everywhere.”

“I’m storing food for winter,” said the ant, “and you should too.” But the grasshopper just laughed and played another tune.

Then winter came. Snow covered the fields, and there was nothing to eat anywhere. The grasshopper, cold and hungry, knocked on the ant’s door and asked for some food. In Aesop’s original fable, the ant tells him that if he sang all summer, he can dance all winter. In many kinder modern versions, the ant shares, and the grasshopper plays music to cheer everyone up in return.

The big idea

The twist: The ant and the grasshopper found about the same amount of food in summer. The ant simply didn’t eat it all at once.

The big idea: Putting aside something you have now so you can use it later is called saving. Saving doesn’t create more food or more money; it moves them through time, from when you have plenty to when you might not. Economists call the trade-off between now and later the choice between spending and saving.

Biology adds another layer. Real animals face the same problem every year. Squirrels bury nuts, bees store honey and some ants really do keep grain. For many animals, saving for winter is the difference between surviving and not.

Saving: moving food through time

Saving means giving up something now so you can have it later.

The important words are now and later. Spending is fun now; saving is helpful later. Here’s a made-up summer for both insects:

The season: 90 days of summer, then 90 days of winter.

The grasshopper finds 3 seeds a day and eats all 3. At the end of summer, he has 0 seeds.

The ant finds 3 seeds a day, eats 2 and stores 1. At the end of summer, she has 90 seeds, enough for 1 seed a day all winter.

The ant ate a little less every summer day, but she never went hungry. The grasshopper ate more in summer and nothing at all in winter. A small sacrifice, repeated every day, made all the difference.

A trap worth knowing: saving doesn’t have to mean hiding things in a box. People often save in a bank, which pays you a little extra, called interest, for letting it use your money. If you save £100 at 5% interest a year and leave the interest in, you’d have £105 after one year and about £163 after ten. Your savings earn savings.

Real ants: the original savers

Aesop’s fable isn’t pure make-believe. Harvester ants, which live in dry places, collect seeds and store them in underground chambers, a bit like a farmer’s barn. Honeypot ants go even further: some workers become living storage jars, their bellies swelling with sweet liquid that they share with the colony when food runs short.

Squirrels bury thousands of nuts in autumn, and they don’t find them all. The forgotten ones can grow into new trees, so a squirrel’s savings plan helps plant a forest.

People have saved food for thousands of years too. More than 2,000 years ago, Chinese officials ran “ever-normal granaries” (常平仓). They bought grain when harvests were good and prices were low, stored it, and sold it when harvests were bad, keeping families fed and prices steady.

How do people save today? In lots of ways:

A piggy bank or a children’s savings account.

An emergency fund, money kept aside for surprises like a broken boiler.

A pension, saved while working, to live on when they’re older.

Saving is surprisingly hard for humans, and scientists know why. Our brains tend to value a treat today much more than a bigger treat in the future, even when waiting is clearly better. Researchers call this present bias. Tricks that help include saving first, before you’re tempted to spend; keeping savings somewhere slightly harder to reach; and giving your savings a goal with a picture, so the future feels real.

The ant’s real secret wasn’t hard work. It was planning: knowing winter would come, even on the sunniest day.

Let's try together

Snack test: put five small snacks in a jar on Monday. Each day, choose whether to eat one or save it. How many are left on Friday, and how did saving feel?

Savings goal: pick something you’d like that costs a bit more than your pocket money. How many weeks of saving would it take?

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