Greetings AC Family,

This week we give you special access to a feeding session of our three ant colonies: the Golden Empire, the Fire Nation, and the Dark Knights, and on the menu tonight are their favourite food, i.e. cockroaches!

We also announce our winner and runners up for our grand, annual Ant Love Contest 2017! Enjoy this week’s episode of the AntsCanada Ant Channel!

Feeding Cockroaches to Ants

Welcome to the AC Ant Room, home to three very large ant colonies.

Each colony contains thousands and thousands of ants.

With all of these ants and brood within these nests, surely there are hungry mouths to feed,

and on today’s menu, we have their favorite food item: cockroaches.

In this episode of the AntsCanada Ant Channel, we will watch each of our three ant colonies,

the Golden Empire, The Fire Nation, and the Dark Knights, feeding on cockroaches, and even

check out some of the other snacks they enjoy!

Also, in this video, we will announce the winner of our grand annual Ant Love Contest 2017

and reveal the winner of a brand-new All You Need Omni Gear Pack, a complete AntsCanada

ant setup!

Today will be full of ant discovery and fun, so be sure to keep watching until the end!

AC Family, sit back, relax, and let’s watch our ants dine in this thrilling episode of

the AntsCanada Ant Channel.

Please SUBSCRIBE to my channel, and hit the BELL icon!

Welcome to the AC Family.

Bon appétit!

Today, I wanted to present tonight’s ant feeding session in a more natural and real light,

so I figured for a change in this episode, we would observe the ants non-timelapsed and

with less editing, instead showing more intimate footage of the ants feeding so we can truly

admire what happens when ants get busy processing their food.

First to be fed is our Golden Empire, our yellow crazy ants.

It’s been about two weeks since they’ve moved into this massive terrarium we call Hacienda

Del Dorado.

It was a way to help them get rid of their body mites.

It seems the ants now have the ability to dispose of their garbage appropriately, as

I see them creating rubbish piles in locations away from the nest.

Here are some discarded, uneaten Fire Nation alate body parts, and look, mites have found

these piles to feed on.

Unfortunately, I still see mites on the ants, but I do see some ants without mites, so we’ll

have to wait, perhaps a month or two more, until the new generation of workers has completely

replaced the initial mite-infected generation in order to truly determine if the move into

a massive terrarium helped.

You will see ants feasting here on some rotting mango as well as some raw honey.

They’ve been working on this for two days now and are definitely craving their protein.

So here we go. Dropping in a native Philippine cockroach!

AC Family, enjoy watching the Golden Empire feast!

More workers are coming now. Word has reached the nest that food lies just a skip and a hop away.

It isn’t long before the roach is surrounded by many hungry Golden Empire workers.

Some have completely abandoned the raw honey to come and help.

Yellow Crazy Ants lack stingers. They instead spray formic acid, and they’re using it to subdue

and kill this huge roach, which, as you can see, is many times their size.

Other workers keep the cockroach pinned down.

Look at these workers trying to pull the cockroach by its antennae. Haha! Persistent little ones!

Now, for those wondering, I feed all prey insects to my ants pre-killed, which means they have

been crushed. This also means that their body parts still move because insects don’t have brains like

ours. They have ganglia, a grouping of nerve cells which run down the center of their body.

This means then that even if you decapitate or crush a cockroach to kill it, it still moves.

OK, let’s let them continue to grapple with this huge carcass and move on to our most aggressive and

frightening ants, the Fire Nation, our red tropical fire ants!

As you know, we recently moved our fire ants into the Fire Palace, this deep Rubbermaid bin full

of soil, which they absolutely love!

It has become the colony’s main nest!

Let’s drop in a cockroach.

This one is a no-brainer. It gets swarmed by ants in a matter of seconds.

It isn’t long before a thick carpet of ants covers this roach.

Let’s add another, shall we?

OK, and now time to head downstairs into the abyss to visit the new outworld on the Silver

Glacier of our Dark Knights, our Black Crazy Ants.

Let’s drop in a roach for these hungry and deserving ants!

Let’s reposition here so we can see a bit more.

In no time, the workers of the Dark Knights are all over this cockroach.

Watch them feed eagerly from the cockroach’s wounds.

These black crazy ants waste no time.

Every night, I feed these three kingdoms different foods.

A varied diet is definitely the key to a healthy ant colony.

The Dark Knights usually get 1 or 2 roaches, as does the Golden Empire.

And the Fire Nation, being a lot larger than the other two ant colonies, take 12 or sometimes I feed

them pieces of cooked meat, like this chicken leg which we offered as their housewarming

gift, and yes, of course, I filmed it, but this needed to be timelapsed because it took 2 days!

And gone!

Now, I don’t know if you remember, but a few months back I caught a trapjaw queen ant and

kept her in the dark and fed her, hoping she would give us eggs so we could start a colony of

trapjaw ants.

Well, I have an update, and you will be both shocked and super excited!

And all of that to come in next week’s video.

Thanks for watching!

And we’ll see you next week, AC Family!

It’s ant love forever!

Alright, AC Family! Were you grossed out or was that cool?

Inner Colony members, today’s episode was a little taste of what you guys watch every

week in our hidden videos, but of course, I still placed a hidden video for you here,

for extended footage of a cockroach being eaten by the Golden Empire.

And now it’s time for the AC Question of the Week!

Last week, we asked:

What is the name of the specialized workers in honey pot ants that store water?

Congratulations to Regnerum, who correctly answered “Aquapletes”.

Congratulations, Regnerum, you just won a free ebook handbook from our shop!

For this week’s question of the week, we ask:

What is the name of the groupings of nerves controlling movement in insects?

Leave your answer in the comments section, and you could win a free T-shirt from our shop!

Alright, and speaking of free stuff, as you know, we love doing fun contest giveaways

to you guys, our AC Family.

And so last week we launched our annual “Ant Love Contest”, where we asked the question

“What is Ant Love to You?” for a chance to win a FREE All You Need Omni Gear Pack.

This year, we received over 1700 entries on our official Facebook page, and so as is our

problem every single year, it was SO hard for us to narrow it down to just 1 winner!

There were just so many great entries that made us smile, made us laugh, made us go “WOW!”,

made us go “what da?”, even some that made us tear up a little and warmed our ant-loving

hearts!

So, here we go! After reviewing over 1700 entries, a big congratulations goes out to our

ANT LOVE CONTEST 2017 winner:

John Poster, who wrote a cool ant poem, which we have included in the info section of this

video.

Congratulations as well to our runners-up.

You guys each have won a FREE EBOOK Handbook from our shop!

Thank you all for playing this year, and for those that didn’t win, don’t worry as we are

always giving away free stuff from AntsCanada.com.

Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next week, AC Family!

Ant love forever!