Ever owned an ant farm?

June 7, 2012 6:45 PM

Experiences of owning an ant farm?

I'm doing research for a short story involving an ant farm, and I need to hear from anyone who's owned one or been around one. (Yes, I know that "ant farm" is trademarked and is not the proper term.) I want any stories you have about owning one, anything you learned from having one, anything at all to do with an ant farm.

posted by mermaidcafe to Science & Nature (21 answers total)

I had one years ago. They weren't nearly as fun as one would expect.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 7:25 PM on June 7, 2012

I had one when I was a kid. They escaped. (I think the plastic cracked. It wasn't very sturdy.) My mom wasn't pleased. I can't say I learned anything other than when you get ants all over your bedroom, your mom will probably yell at you.
posted by Aquifer at 7:25 PM on June 7, 2012 [3 favorites]

I had one, I dug up ant colonies in the back yard looking for a queen so I could have self-sustaining colony. Found one once, but it turns out that the red ants that they supply don't appreciate a strange queen thrown into their midst, much like my mother didn't appreciate me digging up her geraniums looking for ant queens.
posted by JimmyJames at 7:41 PM on June 7, 2012 [2 favorites]

Had one a few months ago for my six year old. We all lost interest pretty quickly. Hard to feed and water.

Ant farm is the proper term, unless you want to use formicarium.
posted by wilful at 7:45 PM on June 7, 2012 [1 favorite]

I was bummed when they died after a couple of months. Also, they didn't make nearly as many interesting little tunnels as all the pictures in the catalogues showed. Only discovering the truth behind sea monkey advertising disappointed me more as a wee one.
posted by smirkette at 7:53 PM on June 7, 2012 [3 favorites]

I think we might have kept ours too moist. The ants didn't live very long, and the tunnels got moldy. Kind of sad. Also, I keep imagining that it must be possible to make a more beautiful case than the plastic one we had.
posted by amtho at 8:02 PM on June 7, 2012

Our ants escaped into the microwave, never to be seen again.
posted by unknowncommand at 8:08 PM on June 7, 2012

We had one of the ones with the gel....I loved it!! The kids loved it... It was easy to keep, just a few drops of water a week....They lived for a really long time, dug out all the space that they had and lived for several months after that. I probably should have investigated how to get them more room but we moved and they didn't survive the move. I'd totally get one again.....neat experience...
posted by pearlybob at 8:13 PM on June 7, 2012 [4 favorites]

We got one for the kids a couple of years ago - one of the old Uncle Miltie specials. You only get a few weeks out of it before the ants naturally die off, as they don't send a queen. Which is just as well since the little frame couldnt possibly hold an entire colony. It was interesting for those few weeks but then they died and we were over it. Ours did tunnel around pretty well, though.

I have seen pictures online of full scale colonies kept by folks under glass. They're very impressive, but there's no way I'd invite 200,000 ants into my house.
posted by jquinby at 8:15 PM on June 7, 2012 [1 favorite]

Let's just say this: if you live in Texas, and you just can't wait however long it will take to get your ants by mail, don't go catch some fire ants and put them in there instead. Just don't.
posted by fiercecupcake at 9:12 PM on June 7, 2012 [9 favorites]

Back in the early 80s, when I was 9 or so, I got one of the bigger Uncle Miltie ant farms for Xmas ... oh man, I loved it so much! I remember reading lovingly through the 'ant care' booklet with its weird little anthropomorphic ant pictures, and I remember checking the mailbox for my ants each day until they came - it seemed like forever before they finally arrived in their little plastic tube. When they finally did show up and I put them in their new home they didn't do too much at first, but before long they really were digging out tunnels, heaping up little piles of that chunky, white 'dirt' the farms came with, designating places to keep the bits of food I gave them and to deposit their dead, just like the booklet said they would; I was enthralled! Any of my parents' friends who came by during that time definitely got dragged up to my room to feign interest as I showed off my cool little critters. Tragically, when we moved that March they got wrapped up and stuffed in a box while I was at school, and they didn't survive the trip. I tried several times to start a new farm once we got in our new place, but they never seemed to live as long as those first ones ... based on everyone else's experiences I'm guessing that first set would have died out pretty soon after our move either way, but as a kid I always harbored a bit of resentment over those movers killing my ants (actually, I was so kid-indignant over the whole thing that it became a bit of a family joke over the years).

Not sure I really learned anything from my ant farm(s) other than 'pack all your stuff yourself when you move,' but I guess they did impart a lifelong fondness for ants - as an adult I got one of those 'space gel' ant farms a few years ago, and it was pretty cool, too ... but nothing has ever topped that first ant farm with its little green plastic 'barn' scene and that odd white dirt.
posted by DingoMutt at 9:46 PM on June 7, 2012 [3 favorites]

I loved my any farm. There's some good material in this previous question.
posted by phunniemee at 9:50 PM on June 7, 2012

I asked for one for xmas in high school, and got it. Serious anticipation resulted, because the ants didn't show up until March. (Part of the ant farm experience is having the farm sit there for a long while, empty of ants.)

They finally arrived! I took them out of their box, put the farm on the kitchen counter, and attempted to pour the ants into their new home.

Pro tip: You're supposed to snap the vial onto one of the little out-dentations on the side of the farm. Pouring doesn't work.

Pro tip x 10: Those little fuckers BITE LIKE HELL.

My mom and I moved the ant farm outside to the patio, then worked to kill any that were left in the kitchen.

End result: Ant farm with no ants, big welts on hands. I lived in fire ant country. All I had to do to achieve the same result was go outside and stick my hands in a mound.
posted by mudpuppie at 10:40 PM on June 7, 2012 [1 favorite]

It was almost as disappointing as the sea monkeys.
posted by Wordwoman at 12:08 AM on June 8, 2012

We ordered one of the new fancy ones with the gel. Getting ants into it was difficult. Like so difficult that we gave up.

The gel is a pretty color, though.
posted by DWRoelands at 3:42 AM on June 8, 2012

They die, inevitably. And they're anonymous deaths, which makes it even more depressing. When I was five or six I had four goldfish who all died, but each fish had a name and it was easy to scoop them out and give them a each little funeral, so it was nowhere near as disturbing as an ant farm. You can't bust up an ant farm to remove and bury your dead ants, and even if you did that's a lot of tiny funerals. So they just litter the farm and you have to look at their corpses every day until the last one dies and you throw the whole thing out.

Relevant Onion piece.
posted by Metroid Baby at 4:51 AM on June 8, 2012

Mine died almost immediately. I think it was mass suicide.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:01 AM on June 8, 2012

It was like watching a non-stop tragedy. Like watching a bunch of people trapped in a wall, and they have one funeral after another. Awful.
posted by RedEmma at 6:31 AM on June 8, 2012 [1 favorite]

We recently had a gel ant farm, which was pretty cool as they tunneled, but then after a few weeks, they all ended up at the bottom and, as most posters have mentioned above, it became depressing. I tried to "free" them, but it was too cold outside, some of the gel material froze and then melted, and we had a whole lot of little ant corpses. I blame myself for that, but I do also wonder how much better it would have been to see them die off one by one. I think they should come with a warning: "May send child into existential crisis.")

Anyway, not that anyone really cares, but I think the best way to transfer them from the tube to the farm is by popping them in the fridge for about 3 minutes first. It won't harm them (note that this tip comes from someone who actually froze them, so proceed with caution) but will slow them down so you can get them in the farm without scattering them everywhere.
posted by dreamphone at 8:08 AM on June 8, 2012

I had one of the "gel" type ant farms one sees in the stores of Science Musea and such these days. A few years ago NASA developed a nutrient-enriched agar in order to deploy an ant colony on the space station (or orbiter, I forget which) to study how the ants would cope with microgravity. The gel was both their tunneling medium and their food. (The tunnels could also not be erased by shaking...not that I ever tried it with ants in there.)

My first group of ants (that one mail-orders from the Ant Range in the southwest somewhere for about $3) were not big tunnelers, but once they expired (several months) I washed it out and got a second wave of ants that were much bigger.

The entire thing is encased in a sturdy hard plastic-- not like your fragile glass-and-sand farms.

Nonetheless, I experienced what Mitch Hedberg exerienced with his Ant Farm: "They didn't grow shit!"

Also, this was in my early 30s, so I didn't experience any angst; just natural wonder.
posted by Sunburnt at 8:10 AM on June 8, 2012 [1 favorite]

I had one when I was maybe 6 or 7. When the ants started to die off (but weren't all dead yet), I had the bright idea of restocking with ants from my backyard. As these were (of course) not the same type of ants, epic ant battles ensued inside the farm. Once the ants had basically all fought to the death, I gave up on refilling it again. (After that I stuck to the game Sim Ant for my ant fix - I swear to god, this was the best Sims game, but I've met barely anyone else who played it).

Reading the above comments, it seems quite lucky that I didn't attempt to mess around with fire ants, which were certainly a prominent feature in my (southern Alabama) backyard.
posted by naoko at 9:26 AM on June 12, 2012 [1 favorite]