Mbote 13’s Blog

Not an information technology related topic at all, looking computer all the time will drive you crazy dude. Take some of your precious time for some fun instead How about having a pet? Cats and dogs are not the subject here. How about keeping ants as pet?

Keeping ant as pet crossed my mind when I found an ant queen in my toilet (Huh?! Yes, in my TOILET! What was she doing there? Wonder.. ) I kept the ant queen on a bottle.

Couple of hours later, the ant queen wasn’t moving at all. Geez, I thought I killed her, so I put her on soil. Amazingly she started to move. Looks like she was looking for a suitable place to start an ant colony. Soon after that,  I lost sight of her. T__T

A little sad of course, catching an ant queen is not easy at all. From then I started to search for information about keeping ant as pet. Not too much effort, luckily, I found lots of information about keeping ant as pet here and there. (If you land on my blog, then you should have ever visited the links I provided.)

Couple of days passed . . .

And yesterday, I found another (or the same??) ant queen. Yes, you are right!, This time I found her when I was bathing! Geez, now I start to wonder if she’s peeping me or what! o_O” Hehe

This time, I’ll not let the chance slip away. I immediately took a bottle filling it with soil. Pouring a few drops of water to keep the soil a wet (So the ant colony won’t collapse easily).

Then I put the ant queen inside it. You know what happened next?

The ant queen stop moving. She’s dead! Sad T_____T I put the bottle in front of my computer and started to googling for more information about ant queens.

Few minutes later, as I looked into the bottle. The ant queen disappeared!! After a few attempt of digging the soil with my pen, I found the ant queen. It’s not moving at all! I thought there were some other kind of small ants pulling it for dinner.

Then I moved the ant queen to the center.

From the information I got from googling, I found out that actually ant queens are good actors! She know how to fake her death!!

Few minutes later, I noticed that the ‘dead’ ant queen position was being moved again! I started to suspect that the ant queen wasn’t dead, then I stared at it for minutes!

You know what, the ant queen started to move and she try to dig the soil! Geez, I was pawned by an ant queen!! What a shame

It’s ok, at least I knew that she will dig a new ant colony for me Hehe ^_^V Then I catched a dozen of worker ants and put them inside. From now on, my precious bottle will be a new ant colony home

Keep ants as pet is really easy and fun! How to help ant queen starts an new ant colony that you can observe and play with everyday! From the information I got, to keep ant as pet is not troublesome at all. What you need to know are :

• Ants need oxygen, so open the bottle cap once few days
• Ants love sugar, but to much sugar will kill them!
• Ants need protein, feeding them with dead insect once a few days is very good
• Ants need water, but only in a small amount. So try to water the soil with a few drops of water each day
• Ants will eat almost everything, so feeding them with anything is Ok. Last night my ant colony have chocolate cake for their dinner Hehe
• According to the information I got, Ant queen can live up to 20 years!! And worker ants will live for 2-3 months. So remember to put new worker ants to the colony if you think the population is dropped

Well, with these information above, I think I can be a good manager for the lovely ants for some time