Mystery at Ben Gurion Airport: Who tried to smuggle 13 ant queens inside a mezuzah shipment destined for distant China, who located the displacement in the mezuzah and where were the ants released?
Ben Gurion Airport customs officials arrested a suspicious package of mezuzahs on its way to China. .
The Ministry of Environmental Protection sent the mezuzahs to a laboratory at the Steinhardt Museum of Nature at Tel Aviv University, where Dr. Armin Ionescu found that it is a unique species of sandy harvest ant found only in the Negev in Israel. To date, no such ant has been raised in the laboratory.
Dr. Gal Zagron, director of the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s Pest and Pest Control Division, traveled south to release the ant in the Beer Sheva area, its natural place, along with Dan Ish Shalom, a pest control center in the office of Yarin Teitler, National Inspectorate of the Nature and Parks Authority. And the reason for the smuggling? A mystery that the Israeli tax authority is working on solving.
“This whole story is unusual,” Dr. Zagron told Ynet. In this case, it was the opposite direction. When we were approached we thought a few ports had just come in for shipment. When we received the mezuzahs we did not find the ants. We thought it was a mistake. But this is a really planned smuggling. “The queen had good conditions in the mezuzah, with holes and a cotton ball with moisture.