Amazing Facts About Ants

Worker ants are most likely to be seen in or around your property. Males and females are produced at certain times of the year. The so-called flying ants have wings and are more common in the summer months. The workers, about 2-5mm in length, are black/brown in colour. The males & females are much larger in size and are about 6.5 – 10.00 mm for the female and 3.5 – 4.5 mm for the male. Garden ants will generally nest outdoors in sandy soils but travel widely in search of food.

Social Behaviour

An ant colony consists of three types of ants: a queen, female workers and males. The queen will spend most of her life mating with male ants and laying eggs. Each carpenter ant colony is founded by a single fertilized queen ant, who lays her eggs in a cavity in wood and feeds them with her own saliva. The population may eventually grow to produce up to 2,000 workers. Pavement ants may have multiple queens and colonies with 3,000 to 4,000 workers.

What Do Ants Eat

Ants will eat almost anything, using their scissors like jaws to squeeze the juice from captured insects or plants. Common house ants love sweet sugary foods and are especially partial to fruit. In addition to sweets, Argentine ants will eat meat, eggs and oil. When they finally leave the colony to look for food, Argentine ants leave a pheromone trail that will tell other ants know not to visit the same area twice. Ants can carry large amounts of food, up to 20 times the weight of their own body.

Ants Don’t Have Ears, And Some Of Them Don’t Have Eyes!

Ants have the ability to listen by feeling vibrations from the ground through their feet, and eye-less ants such as the driver ant species can communicate by using their antenna!

Plus, they can send chemical signals (called pheromones) that are released through their bodies to send messages to other ants! They send out warnings when danger’s near, leave trails of pheremones leading to food sources and even use them to attract a mate – a sort of ant love potion!

The Largest Ants Nest Ever Found

It was 3700 miles long and located in Argentina in the year 2000, the ginormous colony housed 33 ant populations which had merged into one giant super colony , with millions of nests and billions of workers!