COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Honey ants are believed to be nocturnal, but the guards have been forced into action this morning.

“Ah hah,” exclaims the intruder, a retired college professor swirling a twig of mountain mahogany in the nest hole. “Here they are.”

Scurrying out on their spindly legs, the ants’ black and beady eyes spot John Conway, for whom they are no match, no matter how much they spray their formic acid. It can’t be seen by the human eye but can be detected by its scent, a hint of vinegar.

Conway, 75, is at the Garden of the Gods park to get a closer look. He has spent his summer at the park, embarking on every footpath and scouring ridges for nests like these. They are odd — craterlike, with built-up debris surrounding a hole bigger than other ant entrances. But they are still easy to miss.

“They don’t draw a lot of attention,” says Bret Tennis, the Garden’s longtime manager, “but that doesn’t mean they’re any less important.”

They are actually one of the park’s most storied creatures. They don’t get the crowds that the bighorn sheep do on Bighorn Sheep Day, but they figure prominently in Tennis’ wildlife presentations to curious audiences.

It was here, he tells them, that honey ants were first definitively described to Americans. The Rev. Henry C. McCook in 1881 published “The Honey Ants of the Garden of the Gods,” in which he wastes no time describing “the peculiarity” of the species.

Reads the first paragraph: “(O)ne of the castes or worker forms has the abdomen distended to the size and form of a currant or small grape, and entirely filled with a grape-sugar or ‘honey.’”

Swollen repletes, as the sacrificial nectar givers are known, dangle in a picture the Garden displays. That’s how they spend their lives, Conway explains: feeding kin as they hang from a specially constructed chamber in the deep passageways below.

“Talk about sacrificing your life for the good of a colony, or the good of a population,” Conway says.

Near this heavily trafficked part of the Garden, a runner stops for a breather, tilting his head a bit, as if confused by the man and his ants. Remarkably, the nest appears to thrive where many feet trample, as do some of the other 10 that Conway has recorded since early June.

Also remarkable to him, some of the nests seem to be almost exactly where they were when he first studied them here 44 years ago as a doctoral student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

As he continues his mission this summer, he suspects many others will be gone.

So much of the habitat has changed. He sees subdivisions he didn’t see before, roads and trails, too. A restaurant now consumes a once-barren bluff where he observed the ants gather nutrients from a bush.

Using Conway’s old data, park rangers have gone out searching for the recorded colonies. “We weren’t seeing what we wanted to see,” Tennis says.

So the park has brought back Conway all these years later, to better understand how the tiny inhabitants are faring amid development and 5.8 million visitors a year.

“There’s still an awful lot we don’t know,” Conway says of honey ants.

That’s why he made them his academic focus in the first place. He still doesn’t have an answer to the question posed by his Ph.D. adviser back at Boulder: Why are some ants repletes and others not?

They vary in size, the bigger ones known as majors, and one theory is that majors are simply better suited to store the nectar.

“But it’s been found, if you take all the majors away, as has been done in labs, and feed smaller ones sugar water and stuff, the smaller ones will swell up as well,” Conway says.

Their mystery is as inspiring to him as their might. This was one recurring topic of discussion with a colleague at the University of Scranton, Conway’s last teaching post.

That one ant can move 10 times its body weight is one thing, says Marc Seid, the fellow ant expert at the Pennsylvania school. That 10 together can move 1,000 times is another.

“It’s not the one ant; it’s what they can do as a group,” he says. “The sum is greater than all the parts kind of thing. They can do things together that no single ant can do.”

In the cold, they metabolize to become like heaters for each other. They avoid contamination by grooming each other like chimpanzees.

They build underground cities, which Conway has excavated elsewhere in the honey ant-abundant Southwest. Through what is sometimes tough soil for a man to dig, they make corridors as far down as 4 feet, Conway has learned. He knows he’s at the bottom when he’s found the queen; the workers, all females, hurry her to the deepest depths in these cases of invasion.

Conway’s research also has taken him to Australia, where honey ants have a place in legend. They are central to the Aboriginal people’s Dreamtime, the vision of the world before creation. To find the honey ants there, Conway had to follow a family to the place in the outback that they considered sacred.

The honey ants’ place in the Garden of the Gods is far from that. Nonetheless, they offer an education, Conway says.

He’s an admirer of Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard naturalist whose provocative book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” explores what appears to be biologically programmed behavior of ants.

“He makes an analogy,” Conway says. “What about humans?”

Human beings, he says, have constructs such as race, religion and politics, “all these things that separate us instead of coming together,” things beyond our nature.

“I think it’s one of the burdens we have that could be our undoing,” he says. “The fact that we know we should probably get along with one another, and we just can’t do that.”

But this is no time for existential waxing. Satisfied by his observation at the nest, he releases the ants, hoping at the next one he finds that same precious life.