Must You Pile the Food Sky High?
Answer:
STRENGTH IN NOS
The first step is to solve the two logic puzzles. For the Masyu, it's easiest to start with the foods and anthills at the border and work inwards. Since the path must traverse straight through anthills and cannot run into the border walls, the path must travel through the anthills parallel to the walls. On the contrary, The path must travel away from the border walls where the grapes and wheat are, since the path must make 90° turns at those points. You can apply the same logical steps to anthills and foods that have paths laid out next to them as you are filling in the grid.
Another helpful insight is to realize that the path cannot travel vertically straight through the 3 anthills in the 6th column. This is because such a path would violate the constraint that the path must turn immediately before or after traveling through the middle anthill, while also traveling straight through the upper and lower anthills. You can continue along similar lines of reasoning to complete the path.
For the skyscraper sudoku, you can probably fill in a good chunk of the grid with basic Sudoku techniques. The pile-height constraints determine the unique solution. One helpful trick is that any edge that sees only 1 pile must be seeing the height 9 pile immediately in front of it.
Once both grids are complete, it's time to figure out how to relate the two grids. You might notice that both grids are 9x9, so they can be overlayed on top of each other. You can think of the food storage sudoku grid as being directly underneath the above-ground grassy masyu puzzle. From a bird's eye view looking down, you'd be able to see through the anthills holes and see the piles of food underneath. (Note: this is not how real ant tunnels work, but we can pretend for the sake of this puzzle. 🙂) The food will eventually be eaten, leaving only anthills.
Thus, if we take the numbers that remain (are in the same positions as the anthills), starting from the the top row and traveling clockwise, we'll get the sequence 8 9 7 1 5 2 9 3 4 5 5 6 8, in this order.
Using the surrounding leaves to map these numbers to letters (E=1, G=2, etc.) gives STRENGTH IN NOS, the answer to this puzzle.
Authors' Notes
This was actually our first time really sitting down and learning to do Masyu puzzles. We think this ended up being a great choice for A Bug's Life under the flavor that we were mapping out a path to bring food back to the colony. Masyu puzzles are really quite elegant so we're happy with the result (as well as our cheesy "must you" pun in the title).
A bonus pun is that the answer can be read as both "strength in no's" as well as "strength in numbers". Ants get their strengths from their numbers, and in A Bug's Life, the ants finally show their true strength by rebelling and saying "no" to the oppressive grasshoppers who kept taking the fruits of their labor. A fitting answer given that this puzzle also involves numbers!