I'm very enthusiastic about ant-keeping but due to various reasons never had an ant farm before. Unfortunately I made a basic mistake, not creating an "arena" for the ants, as I thought the ant farm was enough.
I've since put the farm into an arena. The farm itself is primitive and doesn't have a "pump" to add water to the nest. In order to keep the ants hydrated I've spread some cotton balls in the arena and drip water (sometimes but not always sugar water) onto them. On rare occasion I'll miss with the squirter and the water will just end up wetting part of the arena. The ants will often take bits of soil or even seeds and put them around the cotton balls or in the water. I don't know why they do this.
Because they're harvester ants, I naturally figured they would eat seeds. I bought some very small honey-dipped birdseed for them, but they don't eat them. They will happily eat bits of apple dropped into the arena though, and are voracious consumers of oatmeal. The seeds, while the smallest I could find, are bigger than the ants' heads, and they probably can't actually eat the seeds. Does anyone know any really small seed types?
The ants are just workers, I live in Canada and couldn't buy any queens near where I live. (I tried to start a colony with a queen I found after a mating flight but she absolutely hated the ant farm and after three weeks of her not digging I just let her go. I fear she may not have been mated by the time I picked her up.) So after a certain point all the workers will die, and I'll be bereft. Rather than just buying a new set of workers, I want to improve my setup first. I can buy a better arena (something flatter) but I'm having trouble finding a "good" farm itself.
You can find an example of a decent ant farm at this link: https://tarheelants....mber-mothership- it even has a hydration system, but I have a problem with it. The chambers are pre-dug. I want to see the ants dig their own tunnels. (The Pogonomyrmex dug up so much dirt they could easily reach the top of the ant farm, one of those problems I did not foresee, and so could escape. Not a problem as they can't breed, but a problem as they can sting. That's one reason to have an arena, it isn't necessary to keep them confined to a little ant farm. Watching them dig was fun too, so I don't want to give that up.)
Otherwise it's nice and flat so easy to observe, and I could easily attach it to an arena.
Edited by Kimera757, July 24 2016 - 7:46 AM.