Smuggler caught with entire ant colony in his luggage. Was planning to turn it into wine.

Well, that’s certainly a new one

When a Chinese national arriving at Chengdu’s airport from Addis Ababa went through the “Nothing to Declare” lane on Sunday, customs officers at the X-ray scanner happened to notice some sort of unusual clump in his luggage.

Opening it up, they were stunned to find a large, living ant colony— something that does seem like it needs declaring.

It turns out that the ant colony, weighing 4.4 kg and home to hundreds of ants, was purportedly going to be a key ingredient in a type of medicinal wine that the smuggler was planning to make.

Admittedly, we have no clue what sort of healing properties ants and dirt have. Anyway, we have no need for such elixirs, being already fully stocked up with cockroach cream and owl wine.

[Images via ChinaNews]