Recently in Ant farms Category

Hi there,

Thanks for your wonderful website and blog! The worker harvester ants that are usually sold for small home ant farms only live perhaps a few months, often only a few weeks! What species of ant would you recommed if I wanted to have worker ants that easily live perhaps a year or longer?

thanks,
keith
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Dear Keith,

We are glad to hear you are interested in keeping live ants! We are often asked about which ants to keep in ant farms, how to make your own ant farm, and how to find ants that live longer than the ones sent through the mail.

They only way to insure your ants will live long is to have a colony with a queen. It is illegal to mail queens, which is why most companies that provide live ants to not offer this service. You can also read more about this here. The best way around this is to collect your own colony of ants from nearby.

We have several previous posts that will help with this:

You can read more about collecting your own ant colony on these posts:
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2011/10/how-to-find-an-ant-queen-austin-arizona.html
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2011/07/questions-on-ant-farm-steve-winnipeg-manitoba-canada.html
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2010/07/how-do-you-collect-an-entire-ant-colony-evan-philadelphia-pa-usa.html
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/ask-an-ant-expert/ant-farms/

For tips and instructions to make your own ant farm see these posts:
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2010/04/how-to-make-an-ant-farm-john-leeds-uk-moving-to-us-soon.html

Best of luck and enjoy the ants!
Corrie Moreau & the AntAsk Team

Hi,
I want to make an ant farm from a small aquarium I bought, but I need an ant queen. I don't want to dig up an existing colony. Would having a queen overpopulate the colony? How would I find a queen after its mating flight? I live in Arizona and it's October. I've heard that you need to look for a small hole with a small pile of dirt by it. I haven't seen any. Will ants make a larvae turn into a queen if there is no queen present like bees do? What time is mating season for ants in Arizona? Should I wait until mating season starts? -Austin

Hi Austin!

Thanks for contacting us! Digging up a colony to find the queen can sometimes be very hard. Often, the queen is hidden very deep in the soil and you might not find her. It might be easier to wait until next season for a newly mated queen.

James Trager has shared his expertise on the times when to expect newly mated queens of some ant species that are encountered in Arizona and are fun to keep in a formicarium. Here is his advice:

"Pogonomyrmex and Myrmecocystus flights are tied to rains, either monsoon, or spring, depending on the species.

Higher altitude, forest species of Camponotus fly on the first really warm days of spring, typically in April, May. Lower altitude species of oak-conifer woodlands, mesquite scrubland and true desert mostly fly with the first monsoon rains.

Finally, Formica species fly in July, especially early in the month, except the really high altitude ones, which may wait till August."

Here you can find more information on the ants of Arizona.

A queen would not overpopulate a colony. It is usually a good idea to have a queen, so that your ant colony lives past two month. The workers often die after this short time period and a queen would always supply new workers. Some of the larvae will turn into new queens, but they need to mate before they can lay fertilized eggs. It is very hard and often impossible to have ants mate in captivity. So it is best to find a freshly mated queen. You should keep your eyes open for several winged ant queens and keep one individual each in a small container. If one starts laying eggs, you can carefully transfer her to the bigger aquarium.

Here , here , and here are some other posts that might be helpful for you.

Good luck with your ant farm!

James Trager, Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

Hi there!

I'm curious as to what you guys feed your captive Odontomachus colonies. I feed mine mealworms because they're readily available, but they'll only accept it if I put the mealworm directly in the nest or at the nest entrance. Also, is it required to feed them sugary foods?

Another question, have any of you had experience with keeping Camponotus in plaster nests? I've heard that they're able to chew through plaster, has that ever happen to your Camponotus colonies? Thanks!

Regards,
Phira

Phira,

Thanks so much for the question, Phira. Odontomachus (sometimes called trap-jaw ants) are one of the coolest ants around. One of the experts on this group, Dr. Andy Suarez from the University of Illinois, gives this advice:

"We find that trap jaw ants are most excited about termites but will live happily on crickets and mealworms. Because crickets and mealworms are often infested with mites (because of the high densities that they are reared in at pet stores), we freeze them for a week or two before feeding them to the ants. We also tend to cut them up so the ants can get a bit of hemolymph. In addition to insects for protein, we try to always give trap jaw ants some sugar water or honey water. It is easily provided by making a 20% solution and then soaking a cotton ball in it. The cotton balls can them be removed if they start to mold."
***
In my own experience, Odontomachus in the wild will recruit to peanut butter baits (O. simillimus in Palau, and O. bauri in Panama). If you want to get more elaborate about ant colony nutrition, A. Dussutour and S. J. Simpson published an article in 2008 formally describing a precisely adjustable diet for ants mixing different protein powders, sugar, and agar. I used one version of that diet as an ant bait in Panama, and found many different ants were attracted to it.

With respect to sugar water, it is important because adult ants actually cannot swallow solid food. That's why you'll never see ants consuming solid food outside of their nest. They have to cut it up into manageable peices and bring it back to the larvae in the nest. The larvae chew and swallow the food, and regurgitate some of it for their adult sisters. So for small ant colonies which might not have many larvae at certain points, liquid foods are very important for the health of the adults.

As for Camponotus and plaster, I actually don't have any experience with that, but it seems like an easy hypothesis to test! Newly mated queens can certainly chew through fabric screening that can contain most other ants. They don't seem to be able to chew through metal screening however. If you like the way plaster regulates humidity, it might be worth trying to reinforce it with some metal screening.

Hope this helps!
Best,
Jesse Czekanski-Moir & the AntAsk Team

Hi Ant People,

I'm planning on starting an ant colony. It's my first one but I'd love to have some red or bright yellow ants. I live in an apartment in New York City.

Is this possible? Can you give me some tips to get started?

Thanks you so much!
James

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Dear James,

Glad to hear you are interested in keeping ants in your NYC apartment! Since you are interested in having some red or yellow ants, I would suggest ordering your standard "ant farm" ants. These are usually a large, red species of Pogonomyrmex. You can order them from many online sources such as:

- Ward's Scientific (you can order live ants and a gel ant farm)
- Uncle Milton's Ant Farms
- Ant Farm Central
- Or you can usually find an ant farm for sale at a local toy store (or natural history gift shop), which includes a certificate to receive live ants.

In addition, if you wanted to build your own ant farm, we have a previous post here.

Also, regarding keeping live ants, please see the following AntBlog posts here, here, and here.

Enjoy your ant farm!
Corrie Moreau & the AntAsk Team

Hi!

I'm writing from Brazil to as what's the matter with my queen ant. She is an Odontomachus, I'm not sure of what specie, and I have had her for 2 months. She has laid several times but none of the eggs hatched; she keep growing a ball of eggs but no larvae appeared. I gave her some bugs and honey and she has eaten, so I believe she's well-fed. Is this normal? Will the eggs hatch? Is there some problem?

Thank you in advance,

Best regards,
Isabel

Hi Isabel,

I'm sorry to hear that your Odontomachus queen is not doing so well. Odontomachus are amazing ants and it would be a lot of fun to have a colony of them. It is a good sign that your queen has laid eggs but that does not necessarily mean that they will grow into adult ants. As discussed here, most queens are too weak to start new colonies. I would suggest continuing to feed your queen and be sure to provide her with a moist and protected habitat (you can check out some of these posts on keeping ants). In the end, it may require collecting a lot of queens before you are able to raise a successful colony.

Good luck!
Ben Rubin & the AntAsk Team

Hi, I would like to know if someone can identify the species of the ant colony I found next to my house. I am planning to build a formicarium and I would like to know how big it should be to hold this colony. What kind of food do they eat? I have noticed that some of them were pretty big... are they queens?

Thanks
Andreas (Brazil)

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for contacting us. It is a bit difficult to tell what these ants are from just pictures but they may be a species in the extremely diverse genus, Pheidole. Pheidole are common and are usually strongly dimorphic as this species appears to be. Dimorphism means that there are two distinct size classes of workers; major (large) and minor (small). Other types of ants can also be dimorphic or have a more continuous range of sizes (polymorphism). The larger workers are often useful for carrying large food items and are sometimes helpful for defending colonies. So the big individuals that you see are the major workers, not queens. We have a great post on how to build ant farms and take care of ants here and several other posts that discuss keeping ants here. There are around 1,000 species of Pheidole and we don't know what most of them eat exactly but these posts provide guidelines for generalized ant diets that should work well.

Good luck!
Ben Rubin & the AntAsk Team

I have a Lasius niger queen and she is mated, have had her for around 2 months now and she has laid several times, but each time the lava go black and never hatch. I think this is because they are not being fed. I have put some small dead bugs in the tank with her but she doesn't leave her little tunnel to ever get to them so I am constantly removing them and adding new ones in hope she will get them to sustain the brood. If I were to collect some ants from my garden (making sure they were also Lasius niger) and put them in with her would they kill her because they were from a different colony?

Please advise.

Best regards,
Tom

Hi Tom,

My suggestion is to interfere as little as possible. It is normal that queens do not take up any food during the initial founding phase. They use the energy from the decomposition of wing muscle tissue to feed the first round of larvae and these will always turn into small workers. Sometimes they lay so-called trophic eggs, which serve to feed the larvae. However, it is quite likely that a queen does not have the strength to make it through the initial founding phase of a colony. For this reason, colonies produce thousands of queen. This increases the likelihood that one will eventually make it. And this would be my advice: try to get several queens and hopefully one or a few will make it.

You are right that workers from different colonies will most likely kill the queen.

Hope this helps!
Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

Hi,

My Wife and I bought my Son an ant farm for his birthday and we're enjoying watching the everyday interactions of the ants. We followed the instructions in the guidebook that came with the ant farm and caught approximately 20 ants in our back yard and introduced them to the colony. I believe they are 'pavement ants' (they're fairly small and light brown in color). I also think they are all workers as there is no noticeably larger ant that could really be considered to be a queen.

There are a few questions we'd like to ask.

1. Will our ants ever reproduce? According to the guidebook, sometimes workers without a queen will start producing their own offspring. This doesn't appear to be happening in this case as the number of ants is dwindling. We started with around 20, but now there only seem to be 6 or 7 or so left. (It has also been about 3 weeks now, and according to what I've read on the internet, pavement ants tend to have a lifespan of 3 to 4 weeks, so this is probably natural).. However, I've also read that in most cases the offspring produced (if any) would be male, which wouldn't be any use to sustaining the colony in an ant-farm context.

2. If they die out, can/should I introduce other ants? Presuming that the probable outcome will be that the ants will die of old age without reproducing, we would like to repopulate the colony. However, I'm concerned that this might be unfair to the new ants, as they might be forever on their guard due to the old ants' pheromones being everywhere. Would this be an issue?

3. What would be a good (locally available) sort of ant to introduce? We're in Manitoba, Canada. I've only seen two species of ant around here (that I can distinguish) - one is the pavement ants, the other is a sort of shiny black ant about 3 times bigger than the pavement ants and seems a lot more aggressive. When I was catching the pavement ants, one of these wandered by and they all got out of its way. I also watched one of the black ants have a furious struggle with a caterpillar and drag it off somewhere. I'm thinking these would be fun to observe, but I also don't want to cultivate something that swarms all over me when I open the food and water holes on the farm. (The pavement ants tend to run away.)

4. Is it 'right' to capture a queen? It would probably be in our best interests to get hold of a queen in order to keep the colony going. However, I don't want to destroy an existing nest in order to get one. Conversely, I don't really want to have to keep 're-booting' the colony every couple of months. What would be a viable (and ethical) way to get hold of a queen?

5. Can/will they overpopulate? The alternative worry to having too few ants is having too many! Do they regulate their population growth according to the space they have or do they just keep reproducing? I'm assuming that in the wild they would just expand their living space to deal with the new population, but in the context of an ant-farm environment, they could get a little squashed. Is this an issue?

Thanks for your help,

Steve - Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Hi Steve,

Great to hear that you are enjoying an ant farm! Here are the answers to your questions:

1. The guidebook is correct in that workers are usually sterile. In rare cases they can start laying unfertilized eggs that will develop into males. Ants (and honey bees) have a so-called "haplodiploid sex-determination system". Fertilized eggs are diploid and will develop into females, while unfertilized eggs will develop into males. Queens usually go on a mating flight, and become inseminated, and this gives them the chance to lay fertilized eggs that will develop into females. Workers, on the other hand, will never mate. In the absence of a queen, they might develop unfertilized eggs, which develop into males. However, I think it is unlikely that this will happen in an ant farm.

2. I would not be too concerned about the pheromones. Just introduce new ants to the ant farm once all the other ants have died. If there are still a few ants left, you could take them out, put them in a little plastic container and freeze them over night. That is an easy way to kill them. Only if the farm gets too messy, I would exchange the substrate.

3. For your third question, I contacted another ant expert, James Trager, and here is what he had to say: "Though some Myrmica species there may sting with perceptible effect, they are smallish and not very likely to sting. There are no large stinging ants in Manitoba. The larger ones the writer mentions are probably a Formica species, which are effective predators, even though they completely lack a sting. Some Formica are rather aggressive and may bite when their nests are invaded, they nevertheless can make rather good captive ant colonies. I must qualify this by mentioning that in general, the bicolored (red and black) species do not thrive in captivity, but the all black ones do. On the other hand, pavement ants (Tetramorium), though smaller and pretty good escape artists (as the writer notes), also make good captive colonies, if properly cared for in a well-sealed apparatus."

4. I would not dig up an ant mount, but if there are some pavement ants and you are not destroying the landscape, I'd say go for it! However, the best way to get hold of a queen would be to capture on right after it's mating flight. The queens will still carry wings, but after they have mated, they will take them off and try to dig into the soil. This would be the perfect time to introduce her into a ant farm. The survival rate of mated queens is not very high, so if you have the chance to find several, I would keep them in little plastic containers with a bit of dirt first. If there is one that starts producing workers, I would take that one with the newly emerged workers and introduce her into the ant farm.

James Trager has some useful advice on how and when to obtain a mated queen for your ant farm: "In fact, there are plenty of mating flights yet to happen across North America (and especially that far north, including some as late as mid-September). These occur in the big genera Formica (now through mid-August), and Lasius & Myrmica (now into September, depending on species). Also, some species may readily be collected as entire colonies under stones on wooded slopes, though, whole colonies can be difficult to handle and their queens difficult to get without some good basic equipment and experience."

5. I would not worry about having too many workers in your ant farm. If you had the luck of obtaining a reproducing queen and had too many workers, you can always take some out and freeze them. Read this post on the best density of workers in an ant farm.

Good luck with your ant farm!
James Trager (guest expert), Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

Hello,

I work in the retail store of a children's science museum in Alabama. Recently, we ordered a gel-enviroment ant farms for our store and set-up one to serve as a demo. The enviroment is really cool, and our ants have been tunneling a great deal. However, I have a dilemma. Today, I tried to open the habitat to let some fresh air in (as per the ant farm instrcutions) and when I did, the ants swarmed to the top and tried to escape. When I placed the top back (I was only able to open the habitat the with of a finger nail) an ant got stuck between the top and the walls...basically got squished. I feel HORRIBLE to say the least, as and my co-workers an museum visitors absolutely love the ants and their cool habitat, and to make it worse I realized that the ant was not dead as I first thought, but still alive with a broken mandible and stuck. (To add to my distress, all the other workers hav been trying for more than two hours to get the other any un-stuck...even though it's futile :() As this ant will probably die, and the instructions recommended removing ALL dead ants.....I am asking how I can safely remove this ant. These are Havester Ants, and now that they swarm evey time remove the top, and knowing that their sting is bad, I am REALLY afraid to even attempt to open the container again. I guess what I am basically asking is how can I safely remove the dead ants without A.) Getting myself sung and letting other ants escape (this would be REALLY BAD...as we have lots of small children and people who come through store all the time) and B.) Remove the dead ants safely and without harming the others.

If you could help me answer this, I would greatly appreciate it.

Sincerly,
Ashley

Hi Ashley,

Sorry to hear about your dilemma!

You could paint the edges of the container with oil, vaseline or fluon. Fluon is a chemical that makes surfaces slippery for ants and prevents them from crawling up on plastic or glass. We use it in our tubberware boxes that we keep our ants in. However, it is white and does not look very pretty. See this post for a picture. You can order it from this website, for example.

To calm the ants down, you could put the ant farm in a freezer for several minutes (up to 5 minutes should be fine). When you get the ant farm out, the ants might look dead, but after warming up, they will start moving again and they might move quite fast. So be careful when doing this! Also, I am not sure how the freezing and condensation water will affect the gel in your farm. While you open the ant farm, you could place the it in a big tubberware container coated with fluon. If ants escape from the farm, they will still stay in the tubberware container and you can collect them with tweezers.

Hope this helps and nobody gets stung!
All the best,
Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

Hi there,
I am in the planning stages of a new ant farm. I will attempt a 2' x 6' x 1" gelatin substrate farm. Similar to the Uncle Milton farm, including the fancy led lights, only larger and wall mounted.
I will also include at least 1 divider in order to sustain 2 colonies simultaneously. My question is; based on the dimensions, I will have a total of 1 cubic foot of substrate. How many ants can a farm of this size sustain?
If I include the divider and thus provide 0.5 cubic feet per colony, how large can these colonies get? Will they be cramped over a short time? Or will I end up with a lot of unused area?

Any insight would be appreciated. Of course any other tips would be great also.

Thank you,
Travis

Travis,

It is always good to hear that people are interested in keeping ants! And you seem to be planning to do it on a very large scale. We have addressed other questions regarding building very large ant farms here and on keeping ants here, here, and here.

As for how many ants your ant farm will hold, that will depend on which ant species you decide to populate your farm with. I did speak with a colleague who has quite a bit of experience with this (thanks Michael!) and he suggested that if you put the standard harvester ants that come with most ant farms "it would seem 600 ants over all would do well or 300 per section".

Good luck with your ant farm!
Corrie Moreau & the AntAsk Team