I bought my first ant farm in 1986 on Clark Street in a store that sold a typical New Town assortment of incense, Kenyan candlesticks, seashell night-lights, and refrigerator magnets. Near the cash register, in a display of toys from the 50s and 60s, was an Uncle Milton ant farm. The outside of the package had a picture of a brown ant in a top hat and bow tie holding a sign: “See the LIVE ANTS dig tunnels, build bridges, move mountains.”
The problem with acquiring prairie ants was my timing. I’d bought the farm in December, when digging ants out of frozen earth is impossible. Feeling a little sheepish, I sent away for ants from California, figuring I could upgrade to natives in the spring.
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It was a month before a padded envelope arrived from Los Angeles. Inside was a plastic tube with a dozen immobile ants crammed into one end. They looked dead, but I tipped them out into Uncle Milton’s farm anyway. Their red bodies toppled down onto the green plastic barn, slipped between the windmill and the bridge, and came to rest on the fake elms.
The newly mated queen draws on her stored reserves to feed the larvae. When the workers hatch they take over the tasks of foraging for food, maintaining and increasing the size of the nest, and caring for other broods of eggs and larvae. This leaves the queen free to concentrate on egg laying.
After three months Uncle Milton’s ants began to die. This was not natural death; in the wild workers can live two or three years. I attributed their demise to some failing on my part to keep the perfect balance of food, water, and fresh air in the closed system.
I tried Uncle Milton’s pencil technique for getting them into the farm–a nincompoop’s approach. When I put the pencil down in front of an ant, she jumped on it, ran up my hand, and was halfway up my arm in about one second. And so were ten of her feisty sisters. Soon they were all over me, biting me as hard as they could with their tiny mandibles.
It was almost three weeks before I learned that I’d captured not one but two queens. Both were sleek and beautiful, twice the size of the small brown workers. Reading Wilson, I learned that multiple queens in a colony are not uncommon in the Formica genus. The colony may be founded by two or more queens, or additional queens may be allowed to enter the colony after it’s been established. Large colonies of some species may have thousands of reproducing queens.
