My partner’s incipient polygynous Atta texana colony that we caught together when I was out visiting. They caught us so unprepared that we were literally cupping queens in our hands until we found a trash can that had an old coffee cup in it. They say the queens will draw blood but they were utterly gentle.

In general I’ve never experienced a more relaxed queen among any species. Does not startle easily unless physically acted upon (ie you try to pick her up with tweezers). They kind of remind me of the ant form of basset hounds in their disposition.

From what we are able to tell, the white flowers(?) or spores that bloom from the fungus is what they are interested in the most.

I’ve been keeping ants for almost 30 years, starting with a glass tank in 1997. Over that time we’ve kept 101 species from 36 genera, from Lasius niger and Messor barbarus to Paraponera clavata, Myrmecia, Oecophylla and Atta leafcutters.

I put together a short film of some of them, real footage from our own colonies. Full disclosure: I run Best Ants UK, so I’m biased, but this one is purely about the ants.

AI declaration: the voiceover is my own voice, cloned with ElevenLabs, and AI tools helped with the editing. All footage is real and filmed by us.

Which species was your first, and which one is still on your wishlist?

Hi all!
I keep isopods and got tired of counting colonies by eye and the stress it creates the animals, so I built SnapCounter:
Take or load a photo, tap each individual and get the total. You can also use colored categories (e.g. workers vs. brood, or different castes).

Screenshot is from my isopods, but it works on anything you can photograph — I'd love to know how it does with ant colonies.

It's in closed testing on Google Play and needs testers for 14 days before it can go public:

1. Join the tester group: https://groups.google.com/g/snapcounter-testers
   
2. Opt in: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.snapcounter
   
3. Install from the Play Store and keep it installed for 14 days
   

Feedback and feature ideas very welcome. Thanks! 🐜

My Camponotus Sayi colony has been going fine for several months and just moved into this rather ants mini-hearth a month and a half ago. They’ve had constant water and sugars, the queen just laid a new batch of eggs a within the past week, I just checked on her yesterday and she was alive and fine. I was going to show her to my friend today and I noticed she’s dead… I’ve been feeding them fruit flies. But at one point I put in about 8 or so live ones with the normal crushed ones to give the ants some enrichment. Some of them crawled into the nest. Could that have stressed her out too much? I did that about a week and a half or two weeks ago. Was the space still too big? There are about 28 workers including 2 majors right now. They do have their trash pile inside the nest, but they’ve brought excess trash to the surface in the past and I always clean it up. The humidity jar is about halfway full and I refill when it’s close to the bottom. The only odd thing I’ve noticed is since she’s moved in she would hang out alone on the ceiling for the first couple weeks, but then I’d see her in other places more often. Usually more or less by herself.

Any ideas? My best guess is I must’ve stressed her out somehow. I would check on them two times a week generally

Hi guys. About 4 months ago I’ve bought Pheidole Megacephala small colony of 3 queens and 200 hundred workers. After initial die off I’ve dialed parameters of their setup and started power feeding to create super colony. Currently there are approx 2 thousands workers. Last 2-3 days there emerged about 10 virgin queens. I hope they can mate inside nest to join colony. But I can’t see any males. Will they emerge later on to mate? How can I recognize them? Should change anything in my setup/care routine?

It's feeding day for our Camponotus Consebrinus, Camponotus Eastwoodi and Meat Ant colonies!

I’ve had this terrarium for about a year now. These ants very, very slowly started appearing about a little over a month ago. I put down some fruit earlier and now I see how many there are, way more than I thought. Strangely, some have a perfectly round abdomen while some have a grooved, elongated abdomen.

What are they? How could they have gotten inside? Surely they didn’t come with the substrate, I assume they would’ve made an appearance much sooner if so.

Normally I’d love caring for a colony but they are living with my 3 year old lineage of cylisticus convexus and now that they have shown their numbers, I see them bickering with my pods.

Concerned about what to do here and intrigued as to how they got in / what species they are. Any help is appreciated.

Middle of North America

Hi! I know this isn’t about any keeping, but I thought maybe this Reddit would treat this better than any pest control Reddit.

I currently have a swarm of ants in my bathroom trashcan because of my dirty menstrual pads. Ants aren’t usually an issue in my apartment. Sometimes if there’s food left out near the front door, some enter. But if I remove the mess they disappear. I just think the pads are attracting them.

Since they’re not really an issue and this seems case specific, I really don’t want to hurt any ants if I don’t have to. I just want to remove the source that’s drawing them. However, in order to do that without potentially trapping them in a trash bag, I need them to go. If it’s hopeless, I’ll just do what needs to be done. But is there any way I could disrupt them and have them go so I can throw the trash away? Then I’m going to try to block off the hole I see them coming from once they’ve dispersed.

I hate killing any critter if I don’t have to, and I have a particular affinity for ants.

Thank you!

Species: Pheidole obscurithorax

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Common Name: Big-Headed Ants

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Location: Houston, Texas, USA

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Colony Size: 1 Queen, 80+ Minor Worker, 9 Major Workers & Brood

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Recorded on Samsung Galaxy s25 Ultra

Hi antkeepers, I desperately need your advice.

I am hastily preparing for putting my ants to cold for winter (into a fridge), but I have trouble preparing them.

• The Problem: As you can see, the water level in their test tube is quite low. The cotton has black mold on it, which the ants don't seem to care about. They usually don't avoid it, it is not on the eggs etc. But I am afraid to put them to hibernation in this setup. Rehoming them in the middle of winter sounds like a really bad idea. So I wanted to do so now.
  • In the gallery you can see my rehoming setup. The new test tube is fresh with a new cotton and enough water. They don't mind exploring it. The straw is wide enough for the queen to fit through. But I left them exposed to light for two days and they just stayed in their old spot!
  • Can I do something about this? Is it necessary to rehome them now or can I put them in the cold and in the fridge as they are now? I don't want to stress them much more.
• The Ants: This queen is this year's catch. I caught it at my doorstep in the central Europe at the end of spring. It seems to be Camponotus Ligniperda. The summer heats helped the first generation mature very fast, but dropped the water level quite low.
  • There are 10 healthy nanites and a decently sized pile of eggs and recently even larvae. I feed them honey water and houseflies I catch outside. They seem to prosper, this is the first problem I need advice for. This is my first colony. I love them and want the queen to live long and prosper.

Thank you for your help!

I had a random question occur to me today. I'm keeping Atta for the first time and was surprised by their very distinct odor. It's an earthy and musky smell that is pretty pungent. I'm sure it's coming from their fungus but I thought it was interesting. It made me wonder if other species have an odor? So my question is what species do you own and do they have a smell?

Hey everyone!

I noticed we didn't have a dedicated regional space for ant keeping around here, so I set up a local Facebook group: Northeast Ohio Ant Keepers.

The goal is to give keepers across Stark, Summit, Portage, Mahoning, Cuyahoga, and surrounding counties a hyper-local spot to:

Share Nuptial Flight Alerts: Real-time updates when species like Camponotus, Tetramorium, or Lasius are flying in our yards so nearby keepers can grab test tubes and catch queens.

Local Colony Trades & Sales: Buy, sell, or swap native test-tube queens and founding colonies in person without having to deal with shipping or weather delays.

Regional Care & Setups: Discuss local diapause/hibernation timing for Ohio's weather, formicarium builds, and species identification.

Whether you've been keeping colonies for years or are just looking to catch your very first queen this spring, feel free to join us!

Link is in comments.

This is my first ant farm. I started off with just a Lasius neoniger queen in March and now there are too many ants to count. A couple weeks ago, the colony stopped having babies, so I unplugged their heat pad and gradually stopped giving them protein. Here they are loading up on honey a couple days ago (nest is a Tarheel Ants bifurcated Mini Hearth - worth every penny!). Anyway, I don't have a wine cooler so I'm asking you guys if this nest will do okay in the vegetable drawer of my fridge, even though it will be at most 40 degrees Fahrenheit in there. Tonight I put them outside to cool off gradually, but it will still be 50 degrees when I wake myself up at the crack of dawn to put them in my fridge. Do you have any advice?

She came. She crawled. She dreamed of becoming a butterfly. Unfortunately, the ants had other plans :) 🐜

A little moment from Garden of Ants, the ant colony RTS/sim we are working on.

Does the way she crawls look natural to you? What kind of caterpillar would you like to see in a game about ants?

More about the project on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3016940/Garden_of_Ants/

Best

Tomas

Every season, the same questions come up: "Are Camponotus flying yet?" "Did anyone see Lasius go up today?" The answers are scattered across Discord channels, old threads and word of mouth, so they're gone by next year.

I'm a keeper building ANTS (ants.arcosants.com), and one piece of it is a nuptial flight map. The goal is simple: keepers everywhere log the flights they see, and over time we get a real, shared record of when and where each genus flies, all year and in both hemispheres.

How it works:

• You report a flight with the genus (species if you know it), the date and time, and the weather if you noticed.
• Locations are coarse. Pins show a rough area, never your exact spot, and sharing is opt-in.
• Reports are reviewed before they show up, so the map stays trustworthy.

Why it matters: with enough reports, we can see patterns for each region, like the weeks Pheidole flies in Florida versus Texas, or how a warm spring shifts things. That helps new keepers know when to look, and it builds a dataset that doesn't exist yet in one place.

It only works if lots of people contribute, so even one report helps. I'd love feedback too: what would make you actually log a flight? What info would you want to see on the map?

This is my Pheidole pallidula colony from Croatia. The queen was caught this year.

Sorry for bad quality I just can't get a good picture

For context, I caught a queen at the beginning of October. I only found 1 and put it in a founding cup where it had laid eggs almost immediately. Unfortunately, over the next 2 weeks it didn't seem to have any fungus. I was able to find a seller of Atta texana and bought a small colony of about 30 workers which had some fungus. When that colony arrived in the mail the fungus was looking sad but nonetheless I donated a small pellet to my fungus absent queen. This was about 1 week ago. The 1st pic shows the pellet the day it was donated and accepted by the queen. The 2nd pic shows the fungal pellet right now. There is noticable fuzz now and things are looking up. I might have to donate more soon but the other colonies fungus is still recovering so I'll have to hold off, additionally, I might need to brood bost but wait for the same reasons. It's small and things are not looking good but I'm staying hopeful.

I'm starting a community based on this Chrome extension because I think it's so insane
r/AntFarmIdle All the fricken upgrades are actual evolutionary aspects of ants, and it's just an entire colony that runs while you have your browser open. If you're a fan of ants at all, I'd download https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ant-farm-idle/hcjmnnhfmcadaijhbneklpohncleicoc JUST TO BE CLEAR THIS IS NOT AN ADVERTISMENT, IM JUST REALLY EXCITED

I got into making ant nests for myself and made way too many. I have to downsize a bit. If you're willing to pay for shipping, toss me what you think is a fair price and help me clear some of these out! Not a business. DM me for questions and if you're really interested in one, throw down a dibs comment

I'm brand new to ant keeping (day 4!) and confused about how much to feed them. I have 1 queen and 9 workers harvester ants. It's about 95 in the warmest part of the colony. I have a little packet of seeds and also some meal worms. How much is enough? I know I'm supposed to remove the trash, but I'm having trouble actually telling the seeds from the seed trash. Tips?

Detail:
I put in a little pile of seeds the first day and they have moved it around quite a bit, mostly pilling it on top of their water dispenser. Is that the trash pile? How can I tell?

Yesterday I gave them a meal worm, which generated a ton of activity, but I can't visibly tell if they've eaten it. Maybe my eyesight isn't good enough for this hobby?

(this pic doesn't show the test tube on the right with an additional water source)

Processing img 67cz8r2yo0yh1...

They're usually in an orange nest so their color doesn't contrast very well compared to a white background.

Species: Leptogenys elongata

Location: Houston, Texas, USA

Video recorded on Samsung Galaxy s25 Ultra

My guess so far is Camponotus, probably fasciatus. Found in West Java, Indonesia.