FAQ: Everything You Wonder About Before Keeping Ants

FAQ: Everything You Wonder About Before Keeping Ants

Before they start, many people worry about the same gut-feeling questions. The good news is that pretty much every problem you can think of either never happens or very rarely does. That is exactly why we are able to keep ants at all!

Below is a Q&A covering the concerns Empire of Ants hears most often from people before they begin. Once you have read through it, you should have nothing left to worry about!

Top question #1: Will the ants escape?

Answer: If they could, we would not be able to keep them! The reason ants settle down and live happily inside their enclosure is that we provide everything they need: a proper environment (a nest plus a foraging area) and the right food. Ants have no special demands beyond the basic conditions for survival. When you spot ants wandering around outside, it is because some need is not being met and they have gone out looking for it, most often food. That is simply normal foraging behavior.

The second reason the ants stay put is that we use lids with ventilation mesh that the ants cannot get through, and we apply an escape-barrier coating in the right places so the ants physically cannot climb out and accidentally wander over the edge, even over long periods. Those are the two main reasons our ants stay safely in their nest and do not escape!

Top question #2: Why keep ants at all?

Answer: In the field, you can only ever watch ants foraging, or at most moving house, and limits on time and location often make even that patchy. On top of that, the vast majority of ant behavior happens inside the dark nest, where it is simply impossible to observe in the wild. What makes ants so worth watching is that they are the only truly eusocial insects in the world that can be kept at home. Eusocial insects have an extraordinarily rich social life: castes, territory and division of labor. Only by keeping them can you get a cross-section view of the whole ant ecosystem, including the queen, egg laying, workers caring for the brood, larvae spinning silk cocoons, and how space inside the nest is organized. None of this can be seen in the wild, and no other animal shows the same complexity of behavior.

Top question #3: Won’t there just be more and more ants?

Answer: With correct care, yes, births will outpace deaths and the colony will gradually grow. But it grows far more slowly than people imagine, and ants are tiny, so even a large number takes up little space. A single nest will typically last well over a year before it needs expanding or replacing, and when that time comes, you simply connect a new module to the expansion port. In fact, what we most often hear from keepers later on is the opposite: they wish the colony would grow faster and ask how to speed it up! The bigger the colony, the richer the behavior and the more there is to watch.

And if you genuinely run out of room to keep going, our after-sales service covers exactly this (see our Terms of Service for details). If the colony has grown too large for your space to expand, we will exchange it for a smaller colony, no conditions attached, so you can keep on keeping!

Top question #4: Do the ants I buy from you come with a queen?

Answer: Yes. Nearly all of our colonies are raised from a single queen right up to the point of sale, and every worker in the colony was produced by that queen, so it is a complete colony.

Top question #5: Will the ants keep increasing in number?

Answer: Yes. Every colony we sell has a queen that we have confirmed through our own rearing to be fertilized, 100%. What makes ants special is that after a queen mates with a male, she stores his sperm in her spermatheca, so she never needs a male around again. The male dies soon after mating, and the queen simply lays the right number of eggs at the right time to keep growing the colony.

Top question #6: How are the ants priced?

Answer: Each species is priced on a combination of rarity, wild abundance and keeping difficulty, and then by colony size. A larger colony means we have been maintaining it for longer (since we raise every colony from a new queen), so it has cost more to produce. Larger colonies are also more stable, which makes them easier for the keeper. What is available depends on the colony sizes we have in stock for the species you choose at the time of purchase.

Top question #7: Will my ants bite me?

Answer: It is the same as meeting any animal. Take dogs: whether a pet or a stray, a dog reacts according to its own temperament and the situation it is in. Startle it and it will defend itself and may attack. Normally, ants do not bite people, but some species, because of their diet and temperament, are naturally more aggressive and will bite if touched, or will fight back when stressed. In normal ant keeping, though, we never handle the ants directly, so there is really no opportunity to get bitten.

Top question #8: Why are the ants so expensive? Aren’t they everywhere?

Answer: It comes down to where they come from and which species they are. The ants we keep are rather special species from the wild, and we collect them without damaging the environment: every spring and summer, we go out into the field to find newly mated queens after their nuptial flights and raise each colony from a single queen until it is sold. Since we currently cannot breed new queens in captivity, every season we have to drive out to mountain areas all over Taiwan, day after day, to collect them.

Top question #9: If the ants get out, will they nest in my house?

Answer: No. Every ant species has its own habitat, and the ants we keep can only survive in the wild. The reverse is also true: you will never find household pest ants living out in the wild.

Top question #10: Can I buy extra workers and add them to my colony?

Answer: No. Every colony has its own unique scent, which the ants use to tell friend from foe, so they simply cannot be merged like that. All of our ants are produced by their own queen and raised into a colony, and you can even tell from their size, since the first workers of a founding colony are always the tiniest.