"Swarming Ant Effect" - How?

[d4rk3lf]

How would I go about recreating this or a similar effect? I know I'd need to spawn the particles and have them follow some sort of path. I am wondering about the back and forth movement and almost like a seek, collide/acknowledge behaviour and the "ant" spawning in different places.

What I usually do in similar scenarios,  is creating inversed spherical wind, so it attracts particles, and then I animate wind movement. 
Other then that you will probably need object bind operator (so ants are stuck to the ground), shape operator with animation on (so ants are animated), rotation operator so they are rotating in the direction of travel, particle physics operator, so they collide with each other, and finally some turbulence applied in the force operator, so they go more random (creating swirling patterns).