If you give an ant a lemonade loaded with Panera, it will become more powerful than you could imagine.

Over the course of a decades-long career, children’s author Laura Numeroff has detailed the situational consequences of giving a cookie to a mouse, a muffin to a moose, a pancake to a pig. But questions remain about how other animal species might respond to being given a gift of food or drink. What quagmires might arise if you gave an axolotl an acai bowl? What twists might arise if you feed a jalapeño to a javelina? What chaos could happen if you gave an ant a cup of coffee?

Fortunately, a group of scientists from the University of Regensburg in Germany has answered the latter question. When researchers gave Argentine ants a caffeinated treat, they appeared to learn faster and navigate more efficiently, according to a new journal article iScience.

You may be wondering why give caffeine to an ant? It’s a reasonable question. But giving various animals caffeine, a cheap, natural stimulant, is actually a centuries-old scientific tradition. Some of the most popular recipients are bees, which consume caffeine of their own accord in the wild. Bees pollinate many plants whose nectar contains low doses of caffeine, such as coffee and citrus plants. In one experiment, researchers found that these natural levels of caffeine even seem to drug bees. The caffeinated bees were more likely to return to their feeder and perform their waggle dance, which is usually the sign of a damn good cup of nectar. Another experiment suggested that caffeine stimulates bees’ long-term memory, ensuring that the bee is more likely to return to pollinate the same plant.

But ants, you may say, are not bees. This too is reasonable. Argentine ants, which can aggressively displace native ants and disrupt local food webs, are much less favored than bees. The species has become established on six continents because its colonies can have multiple breeding queens and are simply Also good at collaborating – a trait that would be commendable if they were better at sharing space. Unfortunately, this is not the case and the serious threat they pose to biodiversity and crops has made their management a conservation priority.

For anyone who has ever lived in a house or had a picnic, “managing” ants can seem like a daunting task. It is. Many control strategies tempt ants with poisoned bait, but this strategy is far from foolproof for crafty ants, which will abandon tasty but harmful food sources, a study recently found. Once leafcutter ants learn that they are collecting fungicide-treated leaves that harm their symbiotic fungus, they associate its scent with danger and will stop collecting poisoned leaves. We would be fools to underestimate ants!

But what might happen, these researchers wondered, if we added caffeine to the poisoned bait? In a series of experiments, they tested the ability of 142 ants to navigate a foraging arena made of a sheet of paper, which they could only access after descending a Lego drawbridge. Somewhere on the paper, the researchers had placed a sugary droplet spiked with 0.25 ppm, 250 ppm, or 2,000 ppm of caffeine. “The lowest dose we used is that found in natural plants, the middle dose is similar to that found in some energy drinks, and the highest amount is set at the LD50 bees, where half of the bees fed this dose die” – so it’s likely that it’s quite toxic to them,” Henrique Galante, a computational biologist and author of the paper, said in a statement.

Each ant ran the course four times, and between trials the researchers removed the sheet of paper so the ants couldn’t follow their own pheromone trails to the reward. The caffeine-free ants did not appear to have memorized the location of the sweet reward, because they did not find it more quickly on their subsequent runs. But ants that received 25 ppm of caffeine (the equivalent of doses naturally present in plants) spent 28% less time feeding, and ants that received 250 ppm of caffeine (Monster for ants) spent 38% less time eating. It wasn’t that the ants walked faster toward the reward, excited by Java, but rather that they were more efficient navigators.

What about the ants that were given a 2,000 ppm dose of potentially bee-killing caffeine? This may not have been the most crucial question for the researchers, but it was for me. An ant is smaller than a bee, so you would think that 2,000 ppm of caffeine would eliminate all the puny insects. The researchers found that the ants didn’t find their reward as effectively with 2,000 ppm of caffeine, which doesn’t seem entirely surprising. But what surprised me was the fact that the ants weren’t brought down by a caffeine intake that would have knocked out half of their noisier bee comrades. Which brings me to my thesis statement.

I don’t know the exact conversion rate of 2,000 ppm of caffeine from an ant to a human. What I do know, however, is that we humans drink a drink that’s like a party match: Panera Deadly Lemonade, so named because it’s the subject of two wrongful death lawsuits. The drink, officially known as Panera Charged Lemonade, comes in three flavors: strawberry, lemon, mint, mango, yuzu, citrus and blood orange and contains up to 302 mg of caffeine. (For comparison, a cup of coffee contains 95 mg.) Panera announced that it would discontinue the drink in the wake of the people it allegedly killed, which is probably for the best.

Can you imagine what an Argentine ant, a creature impervious to 2,000 ppm of caffeine, might be capable of doing after sipping a droplet of forbidden lemonade? Perhaps the super-caffeinated ants found their sugary rewards more slowly because their brains were stuffed with the caffeinated secrets of the world. What monuments could a supercolony of Argentine ants ceremonially doused in a Blood Orange Charged Splash build from scratch? What rare diseases could a group of Argentine ants in a paddling pool of lemonade laden with mango, yuzu and citrus cure and eradicate? What breathtaking works of literature could a bunch of Argentinian ants sipping a champagne tower of lemonade loaded with strawberry, lemon and mint be adapted for television with the support of Amazon Prime? If you gave an ant a loaded Panera lemonade, could it implement universal healthcare? I certainly don’t know the answer, but Laura Numeroff might.