# The Ant and the Grasshopper

_Aesop_ · 1 min read · ages 3-8

A hungry grasshopper begs a group of ants for a few grains of wheat one winter morning, admitting she spent the whole summer singing instead of storing food. The ants chuckle among themselves, telling her she can do no better than spend the winter dancing, and they go back to their work.

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One bright winter morning, some ants were busy spreading out their store of wheat to dry, for the long autumn rains had left every grain of it damp.

Along came a grasshopper, thin and shivering, and she begged them to spare her a few grains.

“Please,” she said. “I’m simply starving.”

The ants stopped work for a moment, which they hardly ever did.

“May we ask,” they said, “what you were doing with yourself all last summer? Why didn’t you gather food for the winter?”

“The truth is,” the grasshopper answered, “I was so busy singing that I never found the time.”

“Well then,” said the ants, “if you spent the summer singing, you can’t do better than spend the winter dancing.”

And they chuckled among themselves and went back to their work.

**Moral:** Work done while the weather is good is what feeds you when it turns.

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- Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper
- Source: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11339)
- Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) — translation: author died 564 BC (+70 passed); translator V. S. Vernon Jones died 1955 (+70 passed)
- License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)