I dumped a pack of old mashed potato mix into a flower pot on my balcony and within a minute ants started to haul this mountain of food back to their nest. Since the mashed potato mix is white it was very easy to track where the ants were going.

An hour after dumping the mashed potato mix, I saw at least two streams of ants exiting the flower pot in opposite directions, one heading into the wooden table you see in the video, the other towards the balcony wall. So, there seems to be at last two separate ant nests of the same species living on my balcony.

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Instant Noodle Ant Farm

Boy am I good. I have been raising ants in yet another ant farm and I didn't even know it! For the past few mornings I've noticed a stream of tiny slow moving ants coming out to drink water from a mug I leave on a kitchen table. By eveningtime the ants are gone, only to appear again in the morning.

One morning, I followed the ants away from the mug to an unopened instant noodle container. Lo and behold, the ants had found their way through the plastic wrapper and made a little hole through the paper container. It looks like they are living in the instant noodle cup. I'm sure they are pretty happy living among a ton of food. Instant noodles are pretty salty. No wonder why they always come out to get a drink in the morning.

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Go Outside and Play (Forage)!

About two weeks ago I felt a little guilty about keeping the ants all locked up inside a tiny plastic container, after all they kept insisting on exiting their new little home through the wire mesh on the lid, so I decided to let them have access to the wild open outside world. I stuck a big straw through the wire mesh (securely sealed with hot glue) and then to that attached a big clear plastic tube leading to the outside through a window.


After I completed the connection, I expected the ants to immediately find this new route to the outside and happily stream in and out, so I cleaned out the bits of food that I had placed inside. To my concern, however, they did not wander in and out through the tube but instead seemed to hunker down in their underground terrain, not even coming out to forage within the ant farm itself.

By the end of the first week, I replaced the food bits thinking that they would be starving by now since I still did not see any ants making forays to the outside world. Lo and behold, the ants started munching on the food bits pretty quickly. What I didn't expect, though, was that even tinnier ants started streaming into the ant farm from the outside to get at the bits of shredded pork I had placed. The resident ants all retreated to their underground layer once again and let the small invaders have the run of the place! By the end of the day, all the shredded pork was gone and the tiny ants had moved on.

Last night, I noticed for the first time, a relatively large number of ants moving up and down the tube. Maybe they only come out to forage when the weather is cooler since when I first introduced the tube the weather was fairly warm-hot.

On the inside of the ant farm, I can no longer see any white egg cases so either the ants have move them deeper inside to where I cannot see them or the larva have all developed into adult ants and I was wrong in my assessment that I have a queen ant and that no more eggs are being hatched. I hope that they have just moved them deeper into the nest.

Now that the ants have access to the outside, I shouldn't have to keep feeding them because they can now forage for themselves. I'm kind of curious as to what kinds of things they bring back into the nest because I see some of these same types of ants on my balcony carrying around seeds and bits of plant matter. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

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Time Elapsed Video of Ant Farm Development

A time elasped video of the development of my little ant farm over the course of about a  month.
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Yes, Your Highness

I observed a bunch of ants in the ant farm attending to one particular ant. I think it's the queen.

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Day 32: Status Check

It's day 32 since I started this ant farm. The ants have enlarged their underground chambers considerably and are now starting to bore tunnels towards the center of the ant farm to where I can't easily see their activities. This video shows just how much digging these ants have done so far.

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The Next Generation

A new army is forming under the restless sands of the ant farm. Over half of the eggs that I collected from the orignal ant nest are in their pupal stage with visible appendages and are turning brown in color. This photo is bad, but you can see the light brown colored pupae mixed in with those that are still white in color.

I already see one or two new ants walking about and being groomed by their sisters. I say they are new because they are much lighter in color then their more mature compatriots.

Every time I take off the covering from around the ant farm, ants start moving the pupae into a recessed chamber where I can't view them. I hope that they'll leave most of the eggs/pupae right along the sides where I can see them.

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Menu

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly the ants like to eat. Here we have a platter of some steel cut oatmeal, a bit of spring roll wrapper, a nice big dead bug, a piece of Chinese medicine-like dried fruit that is good for your throat, and some nice sweet grapefruit juice.

Some of ants seem to like the grapefruit juice but it's not an overwhelming success like I expected. They really, really like freshly killed mosquitos, especially ones that are freshly gored on my blood. Every time I put a plump mosquito in, it's gone in 60 seconds.

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Queen!

The ants continue to tunnel merrily away. They have extended a tunnel downward to the right of the largest chamber where they are keeping the majority of developing eggs. I noticed that there are very tiny eggs sticking to the wall of the ant farm, so I think I do have a queen ant in there somewhere, though I can't really tell from looking at just the ants.
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The Great Escape!

Every other day I'll see an ant on the outside of the ant farm. I don't know if they are getting out or if it's a stray ant from the outside stumbling upon the ant farm.I have a funny feeling that it's the former.

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Bring Out Your Dead!

The ants appear to be using the water dish I have in the ant farm as a dumping ground for dead ants. Here is a picture of eight ant bodies floating in the water, one of which seems to be a queen ant with wings.

This day I changed out the old bottle caps with ones with new water and one with a mosquito and some shredded pork. The mosquito was bugging me the previous night and I zapped it with a mosquito zapper. The ants really liked the mosquito because it was gone in about five minutes with just the legs remaining in the bottle cap. The ants also seemed to like the shredded pork, but definitely not as much as the mosquito.

The ants seem to be settling in to their new home fairly nicely. I've spotted some very small eggs, which makes me suspect that I do have a queen ant in there somewhere. I am starting to see little eyes forming on the pupae. Some of them are starting to form clearly visible body parts like heads and legs and are starting to change to a brown color. Very interesting.

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Modifications

I made some modifications to the ant farm. First, I added ventilation by cutting out a hole in the top cap and gluing on one half of an old tea seaper. Secondly, I made a sleeve cover that goes around the outside of the container to block out any light coming in from the sides.

The ants have built up a network of tunnels and cavities into the sand but they have created a shallow burrow just beneath a yogurt bottle cap where they stashed the egg cases. Most of the ants seem to be staying in this shallow cavity, though I have noticed a few hiding in the tunnels they a have built along the sides of the wall of the container.

Been feeding the ants some papaya and pineapple. They seem to love the papaya since it's pretty much all gone by the end of the day. They really munched down on some oats I put in three days ago but they haven't touched it since. I put in a small bit of corned beef, but they didn't touch it. Might have been too salty for their taste.

It's raining out now and most of the ants are hunkered down inside their burrow. Interesting that they seem to sense that it's raining outside and are waiting it out inside.

One strange thing that I have noticed is that a number of ants are constantly wandering around carrying the body of their dead compatriots. I figured that they would have dumped or buried the bodies somewhere, but no, they keep wandering around with the bodies in their mandibles. Kind of freaky if you think about it. I did notice three ant bodies in the water bottle cap that that has water in it. Perhaps that is now their body disposal site.

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My Little Ant Farm

I made a little ant farm out of an old Costco nut container. I explain how I made it in the video below. This blog is going to follow how the colony develops over the next few months, if it lasts that long.

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