This is a full ant room tour as of Dec 2022, and also an update on all current and past ant colonies and other exotic pets (e.g. Phoenix Empire, Golden Empire, Carpenter Ants, Weaver Ants, etc).

FULL TOUR of My New ANT ROOM 2.0 (Update on ALL Ant Colonies, Pets, Etc.)

What’s up, AC Family, and welcome to another AntsCanada video. Now, this week’s video is going to be kind of different.

I’m going to do a full tour of our updated Ant Room 2.0. It’s basically my man cave where I shoot all our ant videos and termite videos and other animal videos from now on.

I’ve been working on this ant room now for a good almost four years here in the new end house.

And I wanted to give you guys a full tour, so let’s get to it.

Oh, I also wanted to do an update on all the ants that I currently have, the animals that I currently keep—

an update on those that I’ve given away and re-homed, as well as those that sadly passed away.

Because a lot of you guys are asking what happened to the Phoenix Empire, Golden Empire—

well, I’ll be getting to that in this video. So stay tuned for all of that.

Let’s start here, guys. This here is a smart mirror.

I plan on showing people a briefer video on this smart mirror just to give people an idea of the rules in the ant room, what they can expect, and that kind of thing.

Alright guys, so let’s head on in. This ant room is highly secured.

And if you get the password wrong three times, you fall into a pit of fire ants—so don’t try to break in.

This here is the ant room, the updated ant room.

If you guys hear music in the background, I’m sorry—our neighbors are getting festive because it is Christmas Eve today. Yes!

So for all of you who do celebrate Christmas—Merry Christmas!

Happy Hanukkah—whatever it is you celebrate—happy holidays to you guys!

Hope you are also getting festive and enjoying this time of joy.

So here’s the ant room. It’s—I forget how many square meters—but it’s quite large.

It also has a second floor, which I’ll be getting to in a sec.

But as you can see, it’s quite bare. Not a lot of ant setups.

Let me start here first. This here is the utility area. It’s basically my workstation.

So we have a sink here where I wash all my equipment. I’ve got some test tubes here ready in case I find queen ants—

because all good ant keepers have test tube setups ready just in case.

You never know where you’ll find queen ants.

Here’s a sink. Here’s my moose fruit bowl, which I put supplies in. Sometimes I’ll put fruits there.

Here we have cabinets or cupboards. See—AntsCanada products.

Oh, by the way, guys, we are still having our big 2022 AntsCanada holiday sale,

where we’re selling all ant farms and all outworlds at 10% off,

plus giving away a free eBook handbook, which is basically the ant-keeping Bible.

So go check that out at AntsCanada.com.

I call it our biggest sale because before, it used to be just select items that would be on sale.

This year, all outworlds and all formicariums are now on discount. So go check that out.

Start the ant-keeping hobby with us.

Of course, they come with full kits and supplies—tubes, etc.

So I just keep some of these setups here—just keep them handy in case I need them.

These here are, of course, our AC Test Tube Portals.

This here is a termite pair—royal pair.

For those of you who are following our termite series, this here is a different kind of termite.

These termites actually eat wood. Don’t want those to escape. But I’m keeping them there and in the dark.

Here is where I’m keeping our termites. I don’t want to expose them to too much light.

But if you guys are following our termite series, this is where I’m keeping them—

completely in the dark. And I’ve got a piece of charcoal here just to absorb any kind of chemicals or things in the air—impurities.

So yeah, this here is the utility area. There’s a fridge here which currently isn’t connected.

I should be storing my queens in here, but once it’s connected, I’ll put any pet supplies that require refrigeration in here.

Got a few things here—books and gifts that were given to me by you guys.

Alright, moving on to this area—this here is a lamp.

You might find some of the choices for furniture and decor kind of interesting,

and it’s because I’ve chosen pieces that make the viewer feel like an ant.

Like—I feel like this is a giant flower bud, and it makes us feel small.

So you’ll see that reoccurring everywhere.

This here is the gold play button that I turned into an ant farm. Go check that video out if you haven’t yet—

it’s basically the video I filmed when we hit 1 million and received our gold play button.

The Golden Empire was moved into here, but then eventually I moved them out so I could keep this relatively clean.

These here are roach farms.

And this tank here, of course, are my Polyrhachis colony. You guys have seen their videos.

They’re currently pigging out on some jelly. See that, guys?

Now they have a nest there—a debris nest. See?

They’re guarding that really well. And then they’ve also started a nest here.

In their last video, you saw them constructing it—well, now it’s done, and they live in there.

They’ve also started a nest somewhere in this plant. Not sure where it is.

Now, this colony, of course, is called the Blades of Midas.

You guys named this colony, and they are still going strong. Here they’re eating a roach. See?

They’ve got lots of sugar test tubes all around, and I just remove the tubes or I hide them when I film the terrarium.

But I love this colony.

So this is currently the largest ant colony that I have.

There are a couple thousand in there.

This here is a random lamp. I chose it because it kind of reminded me of grass in the night.

It kind of makes the space look really nice.

This here is the old Blades of Midas terrarium.

And I still haven’t cleaned it up, but I feel like I might as well keep the very valuable microbiota and terrestrial creatures that have developed over time—like springtails—

so I could seed my future terrariums or possibly turn this into a terrarium as well. So I’m keeping that.

Now, this terrarium here was designed originally for my last weaver ant colony,

which I managed to raise from a single pregnant queen ant—which is very hard to do—

but they ended up disappearing strangely.

So, a lot of you guys probably didn’t see that video, but if you were wondering about our weaver ants—

they disappeared. Strangely, I could not find them.

I’m not sure if they had been eaten by Pharaoh ants that broke in, or if they had hid somewhere.

I tried looking and watering the setup, and just—so strange—they moved out of their bottle.

However, I decided to keep it, and I’ve moved our centipede—our giant centipede, for those of you who’ve seen that episode—into the setup,

and so it’s currently living in here. I’m not going to poke around to go look for it because I don’t want to get bit.

Currently have some empty tanks waiting to be used, just on hand in case I need them.

Currently working on building storage on our roof deck—which I’ll show you guys later—

so I can move all of these empty tanks and hardscape and equipment into those areas.

Alright, there’s a lot going on here. So this here is the isopodium, where I keep all my isopods.

See them? Tons of isopods in here, which I use to bio-activate my terrariums.

This here is Jabba the Hutt, our horned frog—who’s back there. See? He’s so cute—getting cozy in there.

Merry Christmas, Jabba! Very healthy.

Now, this tarantula here—she just shed last night, so she’s still hardening. I don’t want to disturb her.

But this is the gift that Exotic Slayer, my good friend Exotic Slayer, gave to me one Christmas.

She’s still going strong. Very healthy. However, she is rather aggressive.

At first she wasn’t, but now she is—so I don’t really touch her.

I used to have a hide for her, but then she did a lot of pacing around the terrarium, so I removed that.

The secret is to ensure that the substrate never dries out too much. There’s the water bowl.

And I love her so much—such an easy tarantula to keep.

Some of you guys might recognize this terrarium. This here belonged to Azula—

our green bottle blue tarantula from a long time ago. She was a goddess—she was goddess of the ant room—

some three years ago or four years ago.

Well, sadly, she passed away. She was old. She was an adult when I had acquired her,

so she was probably a second or third-hand tarantula at that point.

And this was her terrarium. I kind of keep it intact because I miss her, and this just reminds me of her.

Who knows—maybe if we get another green bottle blue tarantula, I’ll move it back into this terrarium.

Now, some of you may remember our arboreal tarantula that laid eggs—miraculously—

because I had not bred her at all. And from that egg sac hatched a bunch of babies.

That’s the P. regalis, I believe, that I had.

And that tarantula ended up kind of living with her babies.

And as an update—not sure if you guys saw the update video on that colony of tarantulas—

I started to notice that there was cannibalism.

So I decided to ditch that entire plan of trying to raise a colony of tarantulas together.

I ended up bottling up each of the babies—which was so hard to do—and I re-homed each one.

Then I eventually also re-homed the mother.

The mother actually went on to lay a second egg sac, but nothing hatched from that second egg sac.

I did speak to one of my friends, and he thinks that the tarantula was wild-caught.

I was lied to—it was wild-caught and illegally imported into my country.

She was already pregnant at that point, so I believe that is what happened.

Now before I take you upstairs and talk about other ant colonies, I want to show you guys this.

So this entire ant room is climate-controlled. It’s a smart ant room.

So the temperature is always constant. I’ve set it up so that the temperature downstairs is more or less at a balmy 22°C,

and that seems to work for the animals that I keep down here—the cooler-loving animals.

So everything can be operated using my mobile or these cool things. I can control the blinds—

here, see—if it gets too hot or I need the room to be darker, if say I’m filming during the day

and I don’t want to have reflections on the glass, I can just close all the blinds.

Or if it gets too hot, the ant room can decide to close these blinds just to cool it down a little bit.

Cool, right? Everything is automated and it runs on AI.

But I’m gonna open the blinds because I like natural sunlight coming into here.

Alright, let’s move on up. Upstairs is where I keep the more hot-loving animals.

And currently, there is only one hot-loving animal here, and that is Valentino,

who is my gorgeous green tree python. He’s in there. See him?

Now that we’ve finished this ant room, I’ve been wanting to give him a larger setup.

But he has lived here now for a good—I would say—seven or eight years with me.

He’s getting quite old, very healthy, but when he came to me, he had an upper respiratory issue,

and the vet told me he had a 10% chance of surviving.

However, I spent thousands of dollars to medicate him, board him at the vet—

I even had to feed him for a good two weeks, as in force-feed him—

and he survived. So he’s kind of my miracle snake.

And he is so beautiful. Look at those blue—look at the blue pattern on his back.

Just a gorgeous, gorgeous snake. Now I never touch him. He doesn’t like that.

He’s really just a display snake. We have an understanding—

I don’t touch you, you don’t touch me—kind of thing.

So I can work around here and he’ll generally be okay.

However, he is aggressive, and I’m okay with that. I just love to look at him.

I’m not the kind of reptile keeper where I need to hold the animals.

I just like looking at them doing their thing.

Now, as you can see—no heat lamps or anything needed for reptiles in the country I live.

I’m currently in the Philippines.

And so a lot of you guys have been wondering:

Why are you AntsCanada but you currently don’t live in Canada?

Well, this channel actually did start in Canada back in 2009, where I was born and raised.

Then I moved out here—which is also a long story, but you guys keep asking.

So I moved out here to do show business.

For those of you who don’t know, AntsCanada isn’t the only thing I do.

I also am an actor and a singer.

And speaking of acting—I actually just wrapped up for a Hollywood action series.

I’ll be talking more about that, possibly when it’s out in March next year.

Pretty random—I know, right guys? So yeah—if ever you see, like, I don’t know,

a Community Tab post promoting an action television series in the U.S.,

it’ll be available on Amazon Prime, so anyone can watch it.

You’ll know why—because I was in it.

But here is probably the most beautiful view in the ant room.

See—it’s of a beautiful forest. Bamboo and other native trees out there.

And this here is a net flooring. See that?

We had a weaver come in and it took him one week to weave all of this by hand.

So, you know, any guests could come on here, step on here, and just kind of lounge around.

We plan on throwing throw pillows and bed toppers out here so we could just kind of lie down and enjoy the view,

and possibly sleep overnight here. It’s really fun—kind of scary because we’re three stories high.

We also have glass floors. See these spots here?

Sorry, the glass needs to be cleaned.

I’m still scared to step on them just because it’s—it’s just a mind trip.

Although those who did manufacture it did say that it can hold a lot of weight.

There’s another one here. See? There’s the air conditioning for both floors.

It starts up here but eventually the cold air kind of spills down into there.

It’s currently at 28°C, which—believe it or not—in this country is cold.

With this unit anyway.

Oh yeah—one thing I forgot to say about this net floor is that I wanted a net floor because it kind of reminds me of spiders.

For those of you who saw our Ants vs. Spiders video—one of my favorite episodes on the channel.

And also, a lot of ants that we’ve kept on the channel, including our Polyrhachis ants down there—

the Blades of Midas—spin silk.

So I thought this was a good tribute to all the silk-spinning creatures we’ve featured on the channel.

This piece of furniture here—I saw in a store and I loved it.

I got it because I felt like it reminded me of an ant cocoon.

An unopened ant cocoon.

For those of you who saw our carpenter ant video where the queen and the workers helped a fellow worker break out of its cocoon—

that’s what this reminded me of, so I decided to get it.

It’s a nice lounge chair we could just hang out in and enjoy the ambiance.

This second floor leads to the roof deck, which is out here. There’s a double door,

and the roof deck is currently under construction.

But you can see here—here’s our aviary, by the way.

Feel free to subscribe to my new Aviary Channel—

which currently has no videos yet, but it will soon.

There’s one of the birds. Right now there are more birds there—

all the way down there. I swear, I don’t know if I have birds or bats.

That’s a Crimson-bellied Conure right there. I believe her name is Scarlet.

And so yeah, guys, that concludes the ant room tour—

the updated ant room tour. Now, this is not the official full tour of the ant room

because I don’t have very many ants yet, and it’s currently still not done—believe it or not.

But I will create an official ant room tour, which will probably be a much better edit than this kind of raw edit.

And now to address where my other colonies are.

So let’s start first with colonies that you guys have asked about in the past.

For those of you who are wondering about our carpenter ants—

for those of you who followed our carpenter ant series, where I caught several queen ants and raised colonies from them—

well, I decided to release them into the forest in the back

because I wanted to strengthen the native ant population in this area.

For those of you who are following the Antopian War between native and invasive ants on the property—

currently, I believe the native ant population is thriving still,

but there are several colonies still of fire ants.

Those fire ants are so stubborn and very hard to get rid of.

But I am working on supporting native colonies—

going to be doing a lot of planting now and doing what I can to get rid of fire ants.

There are also a lot of black crazy ants that live in the area, a lot of pharaoh ants,

and some of these invasive ants actually come into the ant room.

They find little openings in the windows and come through the drains and stuff, and it’s really hard to get rid of them.

So the best we could do is to strengthen the native population of ants in the area.

For those of you that are sad that I let the carpenter ants go,

don’t worry because those carpenter ants that are out there will eventually have their nuptial flights,

and I can catch more in the future.

So I had to downsize my collection since the pandemic.

I’ve released a video on those colonies that I’ve let go.

I sadly had to do that because, well, the lockdowns in my country were pretty intense in 2020.

And then moving to the ant room was also a huge, huge feat, guys.

So many complications—we had to change contractors twice,

and it was just a huge nightmare.

And having to care for colonies amid that whole fiasco was just extremely hard.

So I ended up relocating colonies, rehoming them, releasing colonies,

and making sure they went to better homes while I had to deal with building this ant room.

Some of you might be asking about the Golden Empire and the Phoenix Empire—

our yellow crazy ants and fire ants.

Both of those have been rehomed.

I wasn’t able to transfer them all the way out here into the ant room.

It was a one-hour drive by truck, and I mean—if you saw those setups,

you saw how elaborate they were, and they weren’t easy to disassemble—

and certainly not easy to transport with the ants inside.

However, I did relocate them.

One of you, AC Family, from the building that I lived in reached out to me and said you would adopt them.

So I ended up giving them to someone in my building.

I have yet to find out how they’re doing, but I am sure that new owner is taking care of them.

I do want to start a new yellow crazy ant and a new fire ant colony soon now that this ant room is done.

So you can expect that coming up soon.

Now, I had a couple queens in test tubes—like the slender ant queen,

as well as a very rare queen that was super duper cute.

Both of those queens sadly passed away.

I believe they are semi-claustral, so I tried to give little termites to them,

but they just wouldn’t take the termites.

And I don’t know—maybe they possibly weren’t adapting well to captivity,

or there was something missing in what I was providing them.

Who knows? But I’ll keep trying.

And now that we’re out here in Antopia,

I am sure I will find many, many more queens as soon as nuptial flight season comes,

which is before rainy season—usually around March or April, May.

And that’s it, AC Family! That is the current update on the Ant Room 2.0

and our current and past ant colonies.

So I hope that answered all of your questions.

I wanted to address all of that before the year’s end.

Again guys, if you wanted to get into ant keeping, I would love for you guys to keep ants with me.

Visit AntsCanada.com and take advantage of our big AC holiday sale,

where you’ll have 10% off all ant farms and outworld kits,

as well as a free eBook handbook. So be sure to take advantage of that!

And AC Family, I just wanted to say thank you so, so much for the support.

We are nearing 5 million subscribers now.

I’m trying to think of a good concept for our big 5M subs video.

It just blows my mind—the amount of support you guys have shown over the years.

Thank you so, so much.

Now that we have our new location to keep ant colonies,

I have no doubt in my mind that this entire space will fill up very, very soon with ant setups.

And this new ant room now is 19 times larger than my old ant room back at the condo.

So I am extremely, extremely excited to get working.

AC Family, thank you so much for watching, and always remember—

it’s ant love forever.

Happy Holidays! Bye!