Ant World
Introduction
Ant World is a place designed to provide information on setting up your own ant farm and how to take care of it. There is a bit of information
about ants themselves, plus useful websites you can visit about ant farming and a journal on how my own ant farm is doing. Lastly all the
information is about keeping 'Lasius Niger' ants only, these are the common black British ant you are most likely to find in your garden.
Did You Know:- The official name for the study of ants is Myrmecology?
Ant World Menu
Types of Farms
Heating & Lighting
Feeding & Water
Basic Ant Anatomy
About Lasius Niger Ants
Ant Sites & Shops
Types of Farms
Captive
There are many types of ant farms you can buy of all shapes and sizes, some of them are traditional, others are more gimmick like.
The gel in the new type of ant farms is really bad, ants get stuck to the gel and they find it impossible to tunnel, it defeats the
the whole point of having an ant farm. With the remaining types I would advise to not keep a queen in them and only keep a maximum
of 40 ants, however they all come with a great guide and tends to include what the maximum is. The down side of the traditional type is you
can't get sufficient food and water to the ants, meaning they won't survive long, if possible add small tubing to the side and guide it to a
'feeding area', this way you can keep them for longer. The 'Gimmick' type ant farm is not ideal for the ants to tunnel in, but you can feed
and water them easily with these farms. I guess the best of the options is the last one on my list, it has the benefit of a good area for them
to dig and a great place to feed them, I call this the 'Traditional/Gimmick Mix'. When finding ants to put inside the ant farm be sure to only
put ants in from the same colony, otherwise they will fight and kill each other, likewise when you come to releasing them you should be sure to
put them back where you found them.
Free Range
By this I mean home made ant farms where you can observe their natural behaviour rather then see their tunnels. These are much better for
ants, plus you can keep a queen for years in them and watch the colony grow. There is no 'one way' of doing this, eveyone's designs are different
however the most common is recreating a small garden in a fish tank, you can decorate these how you want and the size is up to you. A nice
alternative (and a method I use) is what I call the 'Island' method. Patches of ant area surrounded by water, I find this works 100% of keeping
the ants in their area, thus not running around the house. My other half Chris is not keen on the ants and needed this 'fail safe' to keep
the ants where I have designed them to be.
Heating & Lighting
Heating
Ants like to be warm, if things get cold, they will pack up and shut themselves inside their chambers and you won't see them, in
addition if this cold continues they would remain inside the colony eating larvae which would eventually result in estinction. If you
keep them nice and warm they will continue to thrive and grow. You can buy various different types of heaters:-
To find stores that sell these kinds of item check out my Ant Sites & Shops
Lighting
This is an optional item and I would say it has a lot to do with where you keep your ant farm. If it lives somewhere that is quite
dark you may need to consider a lighting option.
There are various types of daylight bulbs all with fancy names, but they all do a great job of duplicating daylight for the ants.
Feeding & Water
Feeding
As you can imagine you can feed almost anything to ants, but you can give your ants a bad diet or a great diet. It's true that ants
are a sucker for suger, but it's not good to make it their only food or they won't live for long, best practice is to have a nice mix.
Dry Fodder is things like dried flies and crickets or dried shrimps, these items you can buy from good pet stores. But some stores will
supply dry fruit fodder, bloom-poll and fodder flakes which ants love. Insects are really easy to find yourself, to enchance the amount
you have you could have a small bug catcher and mealworm is a great food for ants and is easy to buy because it's also a bird food. Honey
and sugar I would buy from a store, they offer all types of honey plus a mix of sugar and honey and types of syrups, these will make your
ants very happy. However there are other foods you can feed ants, if you are short on insects or fodder you can make a great gel food
for them to eat Myrms Ant Nest has a good recipe or again you can buy vitamin and protein jelly, nectar, fungus and various bird seeds.
The list is endless.
I have a bag of mealworm and bird seed from my local pet store, which will last me a very long time, I give them flies that have died
around the house (which is a surprising amount). Then from stores online I buy bloom-poll plus flowered honey and grape sugar, all
these last a really long time, I rarely spend money on buying food for the ants. They are the cheapest easiest pets I have.
Water
They need water like we need water, but you have to be careful because we don't want the ants to drown in the water you give them,
so there are two great ways of giving them water safely.
You can buy the gel from shops online or you could make it, all you need is cooking Gelatine. But I tend to just get some cotton
wool, soak it and place it into the farm. If you are going away for a time and don't want the cotton wool to run dry you can fill a
tube or pot with water and bung it with cotton wool, making sure the seal is really tight.
Basic Ant Anatomy
I am concentrating on Lasius Niger ants, other species would variey. The Lasius Niger ant is made of three major parts, the head, thorax
and abdomen.
The Head
The head contains features that are very important to the ant, the obvious is the mandibular which are the ants jaws, helping them
get into their food. Just inside the jaws is the pharynx, this is full of muscles which cleans the food of impurities and moves food through
to the oesophagus. Any impurites that are removed are moved to the infra-buccal which when full is emptied by the ant. The compound
eye is made of many little eyes called ommatadia all joined together, worker Lasius Nigers will have up to 120, however their eyesight is not
very good. The real magic for the ant is in their antenna, these jointed 'arm' like items are the ants nose, eyes and ears. They feel
around with them, investigating items, protecting themselves in battle and detecting the scent of different chemicals and pheromones which
helps them communicate with other ants.
The head and the remainder of the body is covered with an exoskeleton, meaning their skeleton is on the outside protecting the organs on
the inside which acts as armour but more importantly prevents water loss and keeps out deadly sun rays. The head also houses the ants brain
which is what makes them amazing, they can remember where they have left things and figure out where they are, but it also has many glands
all great for doing different things like degest their food and produce pheromones.
Thorax
The thorax has many items travelling through it internally such as the heart and oesophagus. The heart is a long tube that travels from the
brain right through to the abdomen, it pumps a clear liquid back and forth within the ant. The thorax is also where the ants legs are attached,
so of course the thorax has many muscles to opertate the legs and wings in the case of an unmated queen. The core of the nervous system is
here aswell helpling the ant co-ordinate it's movement.
Abdomen
The abdomen houses the majority of the ants organs including their two stomachs. One is used for collecting food to feed the larvae at the nest,
which is know as the crop and the other of course is so the ant can eat and live. Other organs include the rest of the heart, ovaries in the case
of a queen ant, and with other species the poison sac and stinger, but it also has a gland called the Dufours gland. This gland is said to give ants
the ability to lay a scented trail that ants follow when retreving food for the nest and is used inside the nest on the walls and if you really search
deep you may find a rumour that it produces the sex pheromone. Lastly the abdomen is actually made of many segments which enables the ant
to extend or contract the abdomen.
You may have noticed that I never mentioned any lungs, well ants don't have any, not as we know them, ants breath through tiny holes all over
their exoskeleton and then release carbon dioxide through these same holes. Ants truely are amazing for such tiny little things.
About Lasius Niger Ants
Lasius Niger ants are extremely versatile, they can live almost anywhere and their colonies can grow to around 8000 workers, but it's
not been unheard for them to even reach 15,000 workers to a colony. Here I plan to take you through the life of an ant and colony, how they
get from one queen to almost 10,000 workers.
Menu
Queen Ants
Nesting
Egg to Ant
Workers
Food cultivation
Social Behavour
Communication
New Beginnings
Queen Ants
We are all aware of 'Flying Ant Day' which happens a couple of times during the summer on a fair day following a patch of bad weather. Queen
ants are large winged ants that emerge from a well established colony, they fly around looking for a mate. Male winged ants are much smaller
then females, almost half the size, and once they have mated with a queen, will die. Once a female has been mated one or more times, she
will land, shed her wings and looks for a good place to start a new colony. Out of the thousands of queen ants that are mated only a small
number will go on to establish a successful colony.
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Nesting
Lasius Niger queens remove their wings as they will never fly again, however if the queen doesn't remove them, they would eventually fall
off or her first born or brood will remove them. When the queen has found a place she feels suitable for her colony she will dig a tunnel
and create a small chamber and shuts herself in. This is the last time the queen ant will see day light, she will become photophobic spending
the rest of her days (approximately 16 years) laying eggs. It's not uncommon for two mated female queens to create and seal themselves in the
same chamber together, but as soon as the first brood is born and working for the colony the queens would fight till one dies, Lasius Niger
queens are monogynous, they will only have one egg laying queen in the colony. Think of her as the top rank of their caste.
Most of the time a Lasius Niger queen will settle and lay eggs right away, during this time she will not eat or drink, the only method of
gaining energy is for her to eat the odd egg she has laid or on the muscles where her wings once were. It will take around 9 weeks for
her brood to be ready to venture forth and find her food, during this process her eggs go through various changes.
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Egg to Ant
The queens first brood will only be a handful of eggs, not many at all. These small, sticky eggs will eventually hatch into larvae, which
are still tiny but now look like tiny maggots, they have very little movement and during this time will grow in size and moult various times,
after about 15 days a larva will become a pupa. The pupa stage can vary depending on the species, but the Lasius Niger ant pupa will
create a paper, silky cocoon similar to that of a butterfly, where the larva inside will become and ant. Once hatched the new born or 'callow'
is almost clear in colour, taking a couple of hours to form the hard exoskeleton and finally turning black and becoming the adult ant we see
emerging from nests.
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Workers
All worker ants are non egg-laying females (diploid) which would have hatched from the queens fertilised eggs, whereas male ants (haploid)
come from unfertilised eggs. The difference between producing worker ants and new queen ants is in the feeding process at the larval stage, but
right now the only interest is getting some workers. The first workers will be weak and tiny, but as new generations of workers are produced
they become bigger and stronger. Workers are the bread and butter of the ant colony, there are various tasks worker ants will do but which one
depends on their age, this is more the case as the colony becomes older. However at this stage their queen is half starved and needs nutrition
to continue to produce eggs. They will participate in various tasks such as tending to the queen and her new brood, extending the nest, and
unblocking the entrance and forging for food so they may feed their queen and the new larvae. The worker is a new level in the caste.
Very occasionally a worker may lay an egg, but these are unfertilised and only created for eating, the only case that it is likely to be allowed
to hatch as a new male ant would be if the queen had died. These male ants can then pass on the genes of the nest to a new queen in the mating
flights. This is the last resort, as without a queen a colony will eventually die as no more workers or new queen ants can be produced.
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Food cultivation
A favourite food for Lasius Niger is Aphids, green fly you find on your plants. Aphids have mouthparts that pierce and suck sap from plants,
Lasius Niger ants have been known to farm them, they allow them to feed on the plants and then later the ants will 'milk' them and feed their
own. Ants quickly learn it's better this way that their food supply will last much longer if they cultivate then if they eat what the find right
away.
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Social Behaviour
Ants are so social and operate a colony so smoothly that sometimes a colony is thought of as a living organism as a whole, everybody has a
role. They know what they have to do and they go about their tasks and will even help and teach others in their colony along the way. For
example if a forager ant finds a new food source it doesn't only tell the ants nearby, but will return home and walk around the nest many times
telling others of the new food source. Ants can run colonies with thousands of ants (hundreds and thousands with other species) better then
most people run companies and households. Communication is key with ants and they look after their own. These are the only other animals on
Earth that do this after humans, monkeys and dolphins.
Did You Know:- Some species are more cooperative then others, some species of ants will form chains to bridge gaps, or floating rafts
to survive floods.
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Communication
Ants use their glands to secrete pheromones, there are many different ways in which ants communicate. When a new food source has been
found scout ants will then use their pheromones to use crowd control and make sure that every ant has her fair share of the new food source,
to not only feed herself, but to carry a fair portion back to the nest to feed the queen and young. This flawless team work is impressive,
another great example is when a forager ant finds and moves to a new nest. This ant leaves a trail to the new home and later more and more
ants follow all leaving their own trails. What soon becomes a large group of ants going between the two nests will begin to prepare the nest
and they divide the labour, they appoint gatherers in the new area, watchmen, following guards to receive the meeting instructions and make a
detailed map of the area.
Ants can also tell the difference between other ants from their own colony, ants from other colonies of the same species AND ants from another
colony or a different species. They do this by running their antennae along the other ant, if it's one of their own they carry on with their
task, if the ant is from another colony but of the same specie, they will let them go, but there is added caution. However they will also let
this ant enter the nest and eat, but they will provide less food to this ant until it smells the same way as the rest of the colony. However
if this ant is also a different species they will either fight (most likely) or run from each other, but the Lasius Niger would send out an alarm
so that others are aware of the possible danger. Truly amazing!
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New Beginnings
The colony continues this way for a few years, each generation of worker ants are strong and more aggressive. They start with nursing the
brood, to nest extension and as they come near to the end of their life leave the nest and start foraging for food. It's considered the most
dangerous task which is why they do this towards the end of their life.
Once all this is well established the queen will lay unfertilised eggs to create the male ant, the last in the caste. When she is happy with
them the colony will nurse brood to become new flying famales or queens. Both the small flying male and large flying females remain in the nest
till the big day comes, on this day they exit the nest with the males and take flight and so the circle of life goes on.
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Ant Sites & Shops
I have come across various sites about ants, but here are my favourites:-
Sites About Ants
Online Ant Shops
