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Learning Gifts and other Live Habitats
Looking for a unique or exotic gift, other than one of our Ant Farms® or Ant Habitats. Look here.

All about Ant farms

A brief history:
Invented by California entrepreneur Milton Levine (also known as Uncle Milton) in 1956. The transparent, sand-filled Ant Farm allowed you to observe the inscrutable doings of a colony of harvester ants.
Originally it could be yours for only $1.98 and during the next two decades, Levine would sell over twelve million of them.
(See the complete history here!)

Today, more than 20 million Ant Farms and Ant Habitats have been sold around the world. The product has become a treasured part of American culture, having been recognized as one of the Top 100 Toys of the Century by the Toy Industry Association as well as garnering considerable media attention throughout the years. New space age ant habitats and innovations such as the

AntWorks Illuminated Ant Habitat keep the idea of ants for pets fresh in the minds of kids and adults alike. 

Antfarms® and Formicariums can make excellent science projects and are great for educational toys for your youngsters to learn with. Read below for interesting facts about ants and their behavior. We have numerous insect videos and documentaries about ants that may help you to understand them better.

Care and Feeding:
 If you have a gel based Formicarium you will not need food or water as the gel supplies that. Ants will appreciate a drop of honey, sugar, or bread dipped in sugar water, and tiny bits of fruit or vegetables. Very, very small amounts will do; you don't want the food going moldy in the bottle. Ants get water mainly from their food; however, every couple of days you can add a cotton ball soaked in water to supplement the supply Be careful not to knock the bottle over or shake it up; this will destroy the ants tunnels.

• Unless you have dug up a queen yourself, you will need to replenish your ants from time to time as ants only have a life expectancy of 45-60 days. It is illegal to sell /export a queen ant in the United States and a few other countries because one doesn't want to import or export a queen to a non-native region where indeed the species can run rampant or cause ecological damage.

How to make your own Formicarium:
1. Place the smaller glass container that you have chosen inside the larger container. The purpose of the smaller container is purely to take up space and to encourage the ants to build their tunnels against the outside glass for easy viewing.

2. Locate an ant colony in your yard and dig carefully in the area where you see the most ants. Transfer some soft soil, with the ants, into a bucket. Try to find some larger ants or a queen ant with wings, along with eggs and larvae.

3. Using a paper cone or funnel, gently add soil and the smaller worker ants to the space between the two containers. Add the queen, eggs and larvae last, sliding them gently down the funnel to rest on the soil. The worker ants will quickly begin to relocate their queen and her offspring in their new home.

4. CAUTION: Some ants bite, so keep your child away from exposure to the ants while you work. Ants will climb even glass walls, so you'll need to securely cap your container. Punch air holes in the lid of the larger container, but make the hole openings too small to allow ants to escape.

5. Once you have the ants in place, put the lid on the container. Make a paper sleeve, covering the container from the bottom to the top of the soil. This darkens the habitat and recreates an underground environment. Your ants will begin working immediately.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT ANTS

1. Like all insects, ants have six legs. Each leg has three joints. The legs of the ant are very strong so they can run very quickly. If a man could run as fast for his size as an ant can, he could run as fast as a racehorse. Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight. An ant brain has about 250 000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human.
    
2. Ants are normally from 2 to 7 mm long, although carpenter ants can stretch to 2 cm, or almost an inch! Ants can be brown, black or red and can have wings or be wingless. They have narrow waists and elbowed antennae.
    
3. They are called compound eyes. The abdomen of the ant contains two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants. Like all insects, the outside of their body is covered with a hard armour this is called the exoskeleton. Ants have four distinct growing stages, the egg, larva, pupa and the adult. Biologists classify ants as a special group of wasps. (Hymenoptera Formicidae) There are over 10000 known species of ants. Each ant colony has at least one or more queens.
    
4. 4. Ant colonies consist of males, females and workers. When a colony begins to grow too large, winged male and female ants leave the colony, mate in flight and then search for a new nesting site, usually in soil, under concrete, or in rotting stumps and wood. Once they find a good site for their new home, they shed their wings and the male soon dies. When the nest has been established, the "queen" lays eggs that hatch into grubs, that pupate into wingless workers. ( Ants go through complete metamorphosis - egg, larva, pupa and adult ) These workers care for the new eggs produced by the queen. Incubation, or hatching of the eggs, lasts from 10 days to several months depending on temperature. Larger ants, called soldiers, are produced for defense and usually have large strong jaws used to protect the colony.
   
5. The common Black Ants and Wood Ants have no sting, but they can squirt a spray of formic acid. Some birds put ants in their feathers because the ants squirt formic acid which gets rid of the parasites. The Slave-Maker Ant (Polyergus Rufescens) raids the nests of other ants and steals their pupae. When these new ants hatch,they work as slaves within the colony. The worker ants keep the eggs and larvae in different groups according to ages..
    
6. Ants have colonized almost every landmass on Earth. They can constitute up to 15% of the total animal biomass of a tropical rainforest; in the Amazon the combined weight of the ants is said to be four times larger than that of the tetrapods in the same area. It has also been estimated that the combined weight of all ants exceeds the weight of mankind.