Dave Bonta watches ants at work in a garden and finds in them something both admirable and strange. The title, "Myrmecology," names the study of ants, and the poem treats that study as more than science. The speaker is learning by looking.
The ants move like "a cold fire": driven and tireless, yet without heat or feeling. They have "no wit or language," so their effort seems pure and mechanical. Even their work goes on "below the bottom of the wall," out of sight, beneath the point where a human would stop looking.
The ending turns toward the speaker. "A little life I study / how to do" can be read two ways: the ants are a small life, or the speaker's own small life is something they are still working out how to live. The mood is quiet, curious, and humble. The speaker seems to find a lesson in simple, steady labor, though the poem never says exactly what that lesson is.