The Ant Blog

They filled up a Leaf  Cutter Ant Colony  with lightweight concrete and excavated.

This is what it looked like.  See Video Below.

Download The Ant City

Pretty Amazing!! I didn’t expect it to be so big.

Just wanted to let everybody know about my Ant Farm website.  It’s www.antstuff.net

There is some more information about ants there, and a couple of videos too. Don’t forget to buy something or visit my advertisers! lol.

Just wanted to say thanks to everybody for your compliments and suggestions.  Elva, I’ll look into adding some videos.

You guys are great. Thanks for all the encouraging words. Please give this blog a digg if you want to.

Science Project #4

This experiment was originally proposed to me by a 12 year old kid, to find out if Ants would be able to sniff out and find bombs or explosive material via association with their food. The experiment can really be used to test the ants ability to recognize any object or material.. Here’s what you you’ll need.

* An Ant Farm, but you can do this with a native colony as well.
* Some sort of material that you want them to locate and detect via association with food. For instance: Explosives, Rat Poison, mold or anything that you would want them to find.
* Magnifying Glass (probably)
* A notebook to chart their progress.
* Some kind of food that the Ants really like

Place the object, whatever it is, in a specified location. Place the ants favorite food close to the target material/object ( inside of it if necessary). Give the ants time to find the food and try to get them to eat near this same spot for a few days/weeks. *This step may need to be done more than one time.

Next, move the target material/object to a new location without placing their food near it. The goal is to see if the ants will go to the target material/object without the food being there because they associate it with being fed. If they do flock to the target object because of association, then that will bring about some even more interesting questions. How far can the ants detect the target material? How long will they go to the target spot before they give up? Will the ants keep going to the object without the food there?

I never tested it myself, but it’s an interesting theory. For instance, what if you fed them by your car keys for the experiment? Would the ants be able to associate your car keys with food and find them before you could? You could just follow the trail of ants until it led to your keys! LOL. Just a thought.

Ant Farms are certainly one of my favorites, but I wonder if worms or frogs or other insects would be as cool. I haven’t tried any of them but you can check out a bunch of other exotic pets here.

You can purchase a Fresh Supply of Ants – 25  Western Harvester Ants for only $7.45.
They are guaranteed to arrive alive and only take about a week to arrive. These are the best tunneling ants you can buy! Harvester ants can tunnel up to 15 Feet down in the wild.

If you don’t wish to pay for ants, and you live in the West (especially the desert), you can usually find and catch these little ants anywhere. Here’s the easy method to catch a bunch of them quickly.

1. Get a 4 to 8 inch kitchen glass (no major pores).
2. Either have a lid for it or something to transfer them into afterwards.
3. Locate an anthill
4. Dig a hole/depression deep enough for your kitchen glass to fit into.
5. Lean the Glass into the dirt below the ants entrance, but don’t tilt it too much to where they can climb out.
6. If the ants aren’t already storming out of the entrance from you digging, then simply stomp on the ground to get them running. You’ll get about 30 ants in about 15 seconds.

How long will my ants live? An ant’s life span is normally only about 90 days. Harvester ants seem to live a little longer, usually 2 to 6 months. There’s been cases where the ants have lasted a whole year but that is exceptional. They are small insects and do not have a long life expectancy.

Why Western Harvester ants? Western Harvester ants are the best ants we have found for digging tunnels and working under observation. They are very efficient and productive workers that are fun to watch. Other species of ants don’t perform as well under observation. Alot of the other species of ants have a hard time digging through the Gel Ant Farms

You can purchase Live Ants for your Ant Farm here!

Why aren’t my ants tunneling? Your ants need a few hours to figure out where they are before they start to dig. However, they should be tunneling within the first 24 hours. If they do not tunnel after one day, try placing a few drops of sugar water onto the sand. This will draw their attention to that spot and hopefully start them digging. Also try blowing into the observatory as this “wakes” them up. If your ants still do not tunnel after 3 days, they have been damaged in shipment and will need replacement. Follow the instructions to receive replacement ants.

1. Like all insects, ants have six legs. Each leg has three joints. The legs of the ant are very strong so they can run very quickly. If a man could run as fast for his size as an ant can, he could run as fast as a racehorse. Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight. An ant brain has about 250 000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human.

2. Ants are normally from 2 to 7 mm long, although carpenter ants can stretch to 2 cm, or almost an inch! Ants can be brown, black or red and can have wings or be wingless. They have narrow waists and elbowed antennae.

3. They are called compound eyes. The abdomen of the ant contains two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants. Like all insects, the outside of their body is covered with a hard armour this is called the exoskeleton. Ants have four distinct growing stages, the egg, larva, pupa and the adult. Biologists classify ants as a special group of wasps. (Hymenoptera Formicidae) There are over 10000 known species of ants. Each ant colony has at least one or more queens.