Hard as this may be to believe, I’ve intentionally become an
owner of ants. Fifty of them. Give or take a few. Now some of you
may be wondering what I’m doing with all these insects, but those
of you with children will instantly suspect that a birthday gift
from a well-meaning childless relative is behind this. And you’re
right.
Hard as this may be to believe, I’ve intentionally become an owner of ants. Fifty of them. Give or take a few. Now some of you may be wondering what I’m doing with all these insects, but those of you with children will instantly suspect that a birthday gift from a well-meaning childless relative is behind this. And you’re right.
I mean, if anyone had tried telling me that, one day, I’d pay good money to have a bunch of ants, the very same type that I see everyday in my kitchen for free, shipped to my house so I could observe them build tunnels in a plastic terrarium, I’d think they’ve been varnishing wood furniture without opening the windows.
But stranger things have been done in the name of science. And certainly giving my children a hands-on educational experience is a worthy goal.
That said, the first lesson we learned about keeping an ant farm is upon receiving one is that you just can’t just round up a few strays from underneath the kitchen sink and herd them all into the container and call it science. Oh nooooo. You need special ants that you must mail order from a P.O. Box in New Jersey.
So while we all waited for these ants to arrive, we did the only thing we could think of: we busied ourselves preparing the terrarium, trying to make it as natural and ant-like as possible. We added the sand and several decorative accessories that came in the box. Like, for example, several miniature plastic shops, trees, two tiny plastic sports cars and something that looked like a miniature gazebo with an adjustable swing.
When the ants finally arrived, my children eagerly put them into their new home. OK, “put” is too mild of a word. Rather we forced them in through the tiny hole in the top of the terrarium by flinging them off the top of a pencil.
“They don’t look so good,” my son said.
“I bet they’re hungry,” my daughter offered.
Of course, this brought up a whole new set of problems. According to the care instructions, these ants preferred a special ant food formula.
According to the recipe, all I had to do was create a mixture of 1 egg, 62 ml honey, 1 gm vitamins, 1 gm minerals, and 5 gm agar salts and 500 ml water. Then dissolve it in 250 ml boiling water. Next, I mixed the water, honey, vitamins, minerals, and the egg until it was smooth. After that I added the agar, stirred constantly, and poured into petri dishes (0.5-1cm deep) and stored in the refrigerator.
Let me just say, I have soufflé recipes that are quicker and easier.
However, despite all of the hard work, I must admit we did learn a thing or two about ants. We learned that 1) the expensive ants you mail order look suspiciously similar to the free ones in my kitchen, 2) most of them would rather live just about anywhere than inside a terrarium, and 3) ants are way too short to push themselves on a swing.
Oh, yeah. I learned one more thing.
If you leave the lid up, all of the ants will eventually escape and thrive on their own by eating the cookie crumbs underneath the refrigerator.
You know, sometimes it’s a funny thing how science works.
