Ants

So we have pet ants, well that's what I call them, husband would probably look at it all bit more scientifically! Here is a video of our ants drinking honey.

It all started a while ago now, when I bought my son one of these, it got us started, and we found this great for closely watching a few ants, ideal for children. You put in a few fully grown ants which you can watch living, and eating.

However after the interest was sparked using the set above, we wanted to be able to see more of the ants, and the best way is to keep a colony with a queen in. So you can see all the stages of development. The above equipment unfortunately isn't suitable to have a more established colony in, mainly due to the size of it.

So husband, with some help from the children has put a lot of time and effort into researching and then building the ants a special home, called a formicarium Then he started a colony with a queen and about 10 workers. These are available to buy so you can start such colonies off. www.antsuk.com

We now have a queen and at least approx. 100 workers (approx. because it's very difficult to count them all when they keep moving!), and various other stages of ant development including eggs, larvae and pupae stages.

We hope to bring you a step by step of how the formicarium was made, and how the ants are kept at some point in the future. You might like to make one yourself, it's fantastic for children too, they love watching them, and can watch all the stages developing.

Recently we purchased this usb microscope, specifically so we could have a closer look at the ants, which it has been fantastic for. It's also been useful for looking at lots of other objects too. I would highly recommend it. 

One thing you can also do with it is capture video and pictures on your pc, which are great. Below is a video we captured of our ants. The ants are Lasius niger, which are common black garden ants, and the ants are feeding their larvae. This is the stage after eggs but before pupae. The two long orange/brown bits you can see, are the legs of a spider, this is what they are feeding to the larvae. These larvae will take a few weeks to grow until they spin a cocoon and turn into pupae. After that, they will emerge as new workers.