Stop Killing Your Ants Like This!
Your pet ant colony is dying and you don’t even know what’s causing them to die. Do ants die randomly without reason or is it the new formicarium that you got for them is not suitable for ants at all? Question, doubts, speculations, it has to be the fault of the seller that sold me a dying colony and the formicarium is not good at all. Nothing can live in this formicarium!
Funny but it’s true. I’ve been there too seeing my ant colonies died and it’s not fun. That’s why I’m writing this article hoping that no one else will ever need to go through the sadness I had again.
If you choose to ignore these advice, the risk is yours to bear. You’ve been warned. If you are a beginner, read this article and remember every single points of it.
#1 Keeping the wrong ant species
It’s funny to think that there’s actually the right species and wrong species of ants to keep. Perhaps I should rephrase this point with “Keeping an ant species that is beyond your ability on keeping them”. A lot of new ant keepers ventured into ant keeping before doing any research and when things went wrong, they quit the hobby. I have seen new ant keepers started joining the hobby because they caught a colony of highly invasive ant species, such as Pheidole parva (big-headed ants), Tapinoma melanocephalum (ghost ants), and Monomorium pharaonis (pharaoh ants). These ants are some of the smallest ant species in the world and cannot be contained with ordinary baby powder anti-escape solution which also require specific formicariums to contain them. I got a customer, clearly a beginner that has no ant keeping knowledge at all, that bought a formicarium from my Shopee store that is only suitable for Camponotus sp. and used it to keep pharaoh ants. You guessed it, these ants escaped from the hydration chamber. He did not get an outworld for the ants, nor apply any anti-escape. I’m not sure if this new ant keeper is still keeping any ants but these unpleasant ant keeping experience caused many new ant keepers to quit the hobby thinking that ant keeping is difficult, it is a waste of time, expensive, and not fun at all.
So before you start ant keeping or thinking of getting a new ant colony, do some research beforehand. If you do not like to read, as long as you got the ID of the ant species, there are tonnes of videos, care sheets, and husbandry tips by fellow ant keepers in various ant communities. It’s a bonus if you joined a friendly, non-toxic ant community. If you wish to join our discord server. We’re still a small community, but it is full of friendly people in there.
#2 Checking on your ants too often
You just caught your first fully-claustral queen ant, put her into a test tube setup, feeling super excited about it. You just can’t help it but to take the tube out every hour to check whether is there any egg. I know how it feels because I’ve been there too and I did it too. But you need to stop doing that. Curiosity doesn’t only kill cats. It also kills queen ants. Queen ants need their privacy to feel secured in order for them to start laying eggs. That is why ant nests are usually made in dark places in nature such as underground, under a rock, under rotten trees, inside a hollow wood, etc. If her claustral chamber is exposed to light, she will be stressed and feels insecure. Some ant species don’t just get stressed by the lights, but are also sensitive towards vibrations. If the queen ants are stressed, they will not lay eggs, some will even eat their own eggs, and eventually die. You may have a quick peek at the queen ant once a week. But the best thing you can do is leave the tube in a drawer and set a reminder to three weeks or one month later on your phone.
Leaving your founding queen ant in the dark and not checking on her is not enough. Remember that you should not feed the queen ant if it is fully-claustral. I have seen some ant keepers feed their queen ants every week because they didn’t know that fully-claustral queen ants have their protein reserve in their thorax. The wing muscles and fats are metabolized and converted into eggs, as well as food to rear the first batch of larvae. They will feed the larvae with that until the first batch of nanitic emerge. Unless the queen ant is a semi-claustral species that do not have the ability to perform such conversion process, you will need to feed the queen ant once every two days. Some common semi-claustral queen ants are Odontomachus simillimus (trap-jaw ants), Polyrachis dives (golden weaver ants), and Odontoponera denticulata (toothed ponerine ants). Even though these ants need to be fed every two days, you need to do it with utmost care. You need to feed them as if the prey item magically appears without the queen ant even noticing. The best way to do this is attaching the founding test tube to a test tube outworld.
#3 No ventilation in the outworld
Some ants just can’t be contained with any anti-escape barrier. There are baby powder solution, fluon, Vaseline, but none of it works when it comes to Paratrechina longicornis (black crazy ants), big-headed ants, pharaioh ants, and ghost ants. While some other ants which are escape artistes such as Solenopsis sp. (fire ants) and Carebara diversa (marauder ants) that cross powder barriers effortlessly within days. Ant keepers tried to keep these ants from escaping the setup by completely sealing off the formicarium and outworld, leaving minimal to no ventilation. The outworld is a place where the ants do their activities such as hunting, drinking, foraging, throwing their trash, burying their dead, also a place for them to excrete. The outworld is basically a place outside of their nest that has all the things that shouldn’t be in the nest. Therefore, the outworld must be well-ventilated and at the same time, it has to be sealed off to prevent ants from escaping.
Wait, what? Sealed off but ventilated? How is that even possible?
A well ventilated outworld is actually very easy to achieve. Technically, all commercially available outworlds already have the ventilation issue addressed by attaching a piece of stainless steel mesh onto the cover. It looks professional, made with clear acrylic and it comes in various sizes. The problem only arise when it comes to DIY setups. It isn’t easy to get fine stainless steel mesh in your local hardware store, and it is expensive. If there’s a local hardware store that sells at least #100 stainless steel mesh, you can make it a ventilated outworld on your own. First you need a container that has a cover. Then cut a huge hole on the lid/cover and glue a piece of stainless steel mesh onto it with hot glue. If you are not very good with crafts, getting one from antsdiy.com/shop is a more viable option.
Alright, we have gone through almost half of the points. If you enjoy this piece of content and wants to receive more ant keeping secrets like this, subscribe to our newsletter. I promise you that we will never send you promotional spam email and every single email you received will definitely add value to you.
Subscribed already? Let’s move on to the next point.
#4 Feeding ants with pest roaches
Ants need protein for egg production and for the larvae to grow into pupae. These protein comes from feeder insects, such as mealworms, crickets, and roaches. Feeding sufficient protein to your ant colony is very important. But never ever EVER feed your ants with wild roaches that are running around your house. Don’t even do it if you are not afraid to catch one with bare hands. The reasons are simple. It has a lot of bacteria, it might have parasites, it might have mites, it might even got sprayed by pesticides from another house. Introducing these harmful things to your colony will definitely harm your ants. A friend of mine got his colony killed because his grandma throw a dead roach that she killed with pesticides into his ant setups. I don’t think you want that to ever happen to your ants.
Not just house roaches, wild-caught insects are not encouraged as well unless you can be sure that they are not exposed to any pesticides. Actually getting a colony of roach is not that hard and it is actually very sustainable. Get a colony of Blatta lateralis (Turkestan roach) and you will have endless supplies of feeder insects for your ants. They breed very fast and they are inexpensive. However, if you are afraid of roach, you can get mealworms or superworms from your local aquarium store.
You can also get crickets for your ants. But if the crickets raised by the aquarium store feed on newspaper, then just forget about getting them for your ants. You can either breed your own crickets or get them from a local breeder. But beware of the noise they make. They can keep you awake all night.
If you can’t handle roaches and worms, then you might wanna consider feeding your ants with protein mix, which leads us to the next point.
#5 Feeding the wrong way
Before I begin this point, I need to make a clear disclaimer that there’s no issue with the product I’m going to mention. The seller is from a prominent ant keeper in Taiwan and had been an honest seller producing high quality ant kits all over the world. that’s right, it is Empire of Ants. I got an ant food from Empire of Ants and feed it to my ant colonies. My ants love it and finished it off in just a few minutes. I add in more for them and left them alone. On the same week, I received a message from my customer on Shopee saying that her Camponotus auriventris colony died after feeding the exact ant food I just fed to my ants over a period of time. I got worried and I monitored my ants. I tried feeding them for another week because I don’t see any problem with my colonies yet.
Lo and behold, on the third week, I found half of my Camponotus irritans colony died, my Crematogastor sp. colony completely died off, and half of my Iridomyrmex bicknelli colony also died. Immediately I red-flagged this ant food. I contacted Ray, founder of Empire of Ants, and notify him on this issue of his product. He explained to me why my ants died and my eyes were opened. This was his reply to me:
“Did you say that you only feed them once with this ant food? No wonder your ants died. You fed too much ant food in one serving to the ants and they cannot finish it. Do you still eat the leftover food that had been on the table since last week? Ant food must only be fed with sufficient amount and cannot overfeed. Uneaten food will spoil and produce high volume of carbon dioxide which suffocates the ants. You cannot feed your ants once a week (with this ant food). You need to feed them two to three times a week and must remove any unfinished ant food.”
Lesson learned. There’s no issue with the ant food, just that I overfed them and the food spoil and produces carbon dioxide that suffocates my ants. How can I not notice that? I always feed live feeder insects to my ants and these feeder insects have no problem lasting up to a week as the ants will be able to finish them off before it turns bad. But that is not the case for this ant food. Well, there are lots of other ant food as well. Some in jelly form and some in liquid form. Whenever you want to use something new, read the instructions first if it has one or learn how to use it first from someone else before you regret it.
Empire of Ants ant food is very easy to use. Just mix 1 spoon of ant food with 1 ml of water, mix until all of the ant food are dissolved, then feed it to your ants on a feeding dish. This is very suitable for small ant colonies especially those that are still in test tubes. Just be sure not to overfeed them and you will be fine.
#6 Moving into a big formicarium too early
I always advice ant keepers to not move their ant colonies that are too small into a large formicarium. If the colony finds any unused chambers in an over-sized formicarium, the ants will throw their trash and wastes in those chambers, which will then cause the nest to grow mold. If you don’t know anything about ant keeping, one thing you need to remember that is MOLD IS BAD. That’s it.
What I usually do with my medium-sized ant colonies are putting them into a tub-n-tube setup. All you need is a test tube setup, a tub to put the test tube setup in, and some anti-escape solution. If you don’t know how to make a test tube setup, here’s a video on how to do it. the tub and tube setup may look ugly, but I assure you that is it my favorite and the most efficient way to keep any ant species ranging from all colony sizes. I have raised single queens from this setup, I keep my young colonies in this setup, and I keep my Carebara diversa super colony in this setup. It’s just so versatile. Until the colony is big enough for a large formicarium, I will transfer the test tubes into the outworld connected to the new formicarium. Best if you use a huge a outworld as the tub, that way you can connect the outworld directly to the formicarium as an expansion to the nest, reducing the stress of the ant colony.
#7 Using gel ant farm
Finally, never use a gel ant farm. Uncle Milton’s gel ant farm was designed for the experiment conducted by NASA to study the effect of gravity on ants in space. The gel contains all the required nutrients so no food nor water is needed. The gel also contains fungicides in it that prevents mold outbreak. Steve Foster1 from School of bugs said in his article that “if NASA used it in space … it has to work well.” But is that really so?
No! Ever since I started ant keeping, I’ve been hearing from a lot of experts saying that “don’t use gel ant farms unless you want to kill your ants.” Now, here’s why. The gel is just to ensure that the ants that were sent to space doesn’t die halfway before NASA manage to do any experiment on them.2 It was never meant for long-term keeping as the nutrients from actual food is always better than man-made food. The gel ant farm only gains popularity because the experiment carried out by NASA was successful. But if you check Uncle Milton’s website, they don’t sell any gel ant farm now. So I doubt those gel ant farms out there are the real thing.
Someone in the formiculture forum described his experience of using a gel ant farm in detail. As I read, I was horrified by it. It says that ants that died in the ant farm doesn’t mold but the ant farm started to smell weird. The queen ant also died later on. When he took out the dead queen ant 4 years later, he described the dead queen ant as “well preserved, flesh and whole, still could move her limbs a bit, and her exoskeleton practically melted (it was moldable and dented).”3 That’s pretty disgusting. If ants are to ever have a movie as entertainment, this scene will definitely be a horror film.
So whatever you do, don’t keep your ants in a gel ant farm. There are plenty of formicariums available commercially nowadays. You can get plaster, concrete, wood, acrylic, plastic, and 3D printed formicariums easily. Get those instead.
And there you have it, the 7 deadly sins of ant keeping. How many of these sins have you committed so far or which sin are you still doing it? Let me know in the comment section below. Or if you realized I have left out some of the sins that you think is important, feel free to share it in the comment section as well so that we can all learn from you. I would love to hear from you all too.
References:
[1] S. Foster, “Are Ant Farms A Bad Idea? Let’s Discuss!” School of Bugs. https://schoolofbugs.com/are-ant-farms-a-bad-idea-lets-discuss/
[2] Gel Ant Habitat With Live Ants, Nature Gift Store, Retrieved date: 23/2/2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.nature-gifts.com/shop/ant-farms/gel-ant-farm/
[3] The Age Old Question “Do Gel Ant Farms Kill Ants” (Tetramorium in a gel farm), Formiculture, Retrieved date: 23/2/2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.formiculture.com/topic/6880-the-age-old-question-do-gel-ant-farms-kill-ants-tetramorium-in-a-gel-farm/
Good post. I learn something totally new and challenging on blogs I stumbleupon everyday. Its always useful to read through content from other authors and practice something from other sites.
It’s hard to come by experienced people for this topic, however, you sound like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks