Keeping ants is back, not that it ever went away, but just recently due to the modern ant farm fascinations and epidemic, ant farms are becoming ever more popular. With an assortment of types, styles, shapes and sizes ant farming has no boundaries and to keep ants is not only highly entertaining, but also a great way to learn about these amazingly social creatures as they live and form a colony right in front of your eyes.Or perhaps have it in the children's bedroom providing them with a great learning observatory that will provide factual firsthand knowledge. They would probably spend hours watching their little friends as they go about their business.


Why People are Keeping Ants?

There is quite literally no end to the interest that you will gain from watching your ant colony grow on a daily basis right before your eyes, you could be working at your desk with the ant farm right in front of you watching the ants progress every time you pause and look up. How cool is that.

Even in the classroom pupils can discover just how close an ants life follows suite with our own. The daily changes within the formicarium would provide them with an amazing insight as to just how floorless and dedicated an active colony actual is.

How to Care for an Ant Farm?

Ants are susceptible to the environment just the same as any creature living outside, but when in a household environment great care should be taken not to keep the ant farm in any extremes as this will rapidly reduce the life expectancy of your ants. An ideal ambient temperature is between 60 and 70 degrees.

One of the best times to be watching your ants is when you feed them, as you can imagine this has to be seen to really be appreciated. Food types can pretty much be anything that you want to try them on, but try not to feed them too much, like us humans they do have a sweet tooth, but are also partial to other insects (live or dead) included in their diet.

There are obviously many different breeds of ant and some more sociable and easier to keep than others, but across the board the ants that are provided tend to be:

Lasius Flavis the Small Meadow Ant. Yellow in colour and one of the most common ants in Central Europe. Living mainly out of site and rarely seen they tend to live mainly off of the honeydew that they extract from aphids which are kept in their underground burrows throughout the summer months and end up as an actual food source in the winter.

Lasius Niger the Black Garden Ant. Can be found all over Europe and in some parts of North America and Asia. These are some of the larger colonies of ants with numbers rising up to and exceeding 15,000 workers in some colonies, but as a rule a normal colony would contain 4,000 to 7,000, the numbers are high as the queen can live as long as 12 years in some cases.

Lasius Umbratus the Parasitic Ant. Sadly they have no real colonies of their own, but a horrific start to infiltrating another colony such as the Lasius Niger ant. A queen will find and kill a Lasius Niger worker and to gain its scent, it will then enter the nest and seek out the Queen and kill her and take her place, the workers will care for her and her larvae and then slowly the colony becomes a Lasius Umbratus colony.

Ants are certainly not creepy nor should they make your skin crawl ant farm fascinations should certainly be followed up with a small investment into a modern day ant farm. There is so much that can be understood and learned from a small formicarium, on top of that is the entertainment factor, which is worth giving them pride of place in your home alone. Ant farms are pretty much zero cost for maintaining, which probably makes them one of the cheapest forms of livestock to keep.