I've Got Ants in My Pants!

Okay, so not really in my pants, that seems quite uncomfortable, but they are in my office. No worries- not a pest control issue- they are happily enclosed in an ant farm. And let me just tell you- they are the COOLEST little insects!

I ordered my six-legged friends a few weeks ago- a vial of hearty Harvester Ants- flown in from the wilds of St. Charles, Missouri- shipped with a cold pack and best wishes. To my utter dismay (and later, my morbid curiosity- paired with a magnifying glass) ALL the ants arrived DOA! Good old Illinois summer heat got to my ants before they got to me.

So, I filled out the replacement ant order form (I guess DOA ants are apparently a pretty common occurrence in the insect livestock industry- poor things) and a few days later, a second vial was delivered -to my home address this time, to be sure I got them unpacked ASAP. This time half lived! Woo hoo!

So, I poured my 18 living pets- and the bits and pieces of their deceased friends (ugh) into my shiny new Antworks ant farm. And watched. And waited. And watched. And waited. And then real life took over and I gave my son a bath and put him to bed. When I checked back in on my roommates, the industrious lil' critters had been quite busy. The first task was to move all the dead ants to one side- just pile em up. An ant can move up to 50 times their own weight, so they just tossed the unlucky ones on their backs and stacked them up.

Once the cemetery was established they got right to work digging tunnels. Have you ever seen an ant dig a tunnel?? SOOOO COOL. First off- I should clarify, these ants are not in your run of the mill sandy ant farm- oh no- these ants are tunneling through special blue gel created by NASA for in orbit ant habitat studies.

The gel contains nutrients, so as the ants tunnel, they are ingesting the "juice" from the gel. Ant fact: Ants do not "eat" food, or at least they don't really chew and swallow food. They squeeze their food and ingest just the liquid. Ant fact 2: Their jaws go sideways like scissors, not up and down like ours. I'm on a roll....Ant fact 3: Ants have two tummies- one for themselves and one to bring food to other ants. (How that food exchange works, I'm not sure, and I'd rather not ponder it too deeply.)

So back to the farm....the ants use their crazy scissor-style mandibles to tunnel and as they break off pieces of the gel to create the tunnel, they carry them up and out of the tunnel, and start to create piles. That is why you always see anthills made of little bits of dirt along sidewalks and driveways- that all came out of the tunnels.

By the time I woke up the next morning and checked on my worker bees...er....ants, they had created quite the little homestead for themselves. Oh did I mention, all the ants are FEMALE? (Ant fact 4) All the ants in this farm, and actually almost all the ants you find outside, are female! Male ants are created as needed for reproduction, and die shortly there after. Not sure how all the social dynamics and hierarchies work in the world of ants, but this all girl band of ants sure can tunnel...check it out...