Greetings Ant Lovers!

First, please allow us to thank you all for 50K subscribers on Youtube! It has truly been an amazing journey with you all. On behalf of the AC team, thank you for the support!

Also, the first Monday of the month has passed which means a new AntsCanada video has been uploaded to the AntsCanada Youtube Channel. This video takes a closer look at the lives and care of Ghost Ants (Tapinoma melanocephalum). We also do a Q&A session using questions you have sent to us to answer. Hope you guys like the new video!

Ant love forever!

Ghost Ants (Tapinoma melanocephalum) and Q&A

Good day, fellow ant lovers and the ant-curious soon-to-be ant lovers. How are you guys doing? Welcome to the AntsCanada Ant Channel and yet another ant video. Now, on this channel, we regularly upload ant videos every first and third Monday of the month, but this video was a long one, and it took some time to make, so we’re just about a day late. My apologies. Nonetheless, this video is packed with lots of ant goodness, so be sure to watch until the end, where I also do a Q&A session answering questions that you guys sent us—very good questions!

Alright, for today’s video, we’re going to look at these super cool and energetic ghost ants, known scientifically as Tapinoma melanocephalum. Now, in case you guys didn’t notice, the footage shown here is sped up; it’s time-lapsed so that you guys could see more of the action. These ghost ants are such a cool and unique species found in tropical areas and semi-tropical places like Florida and others.

Now, if you saw our last video, I spoke a bit about this species. They’re really interesting! If you look carefully, you’ll see many, many queen ants in this one colony. Now, most ant species have only one queen ant per colony. Species that only have one queen ant in a colony are known as monogynous. However, there are species of ants like these ghost ants that have more than one queen in a single colony, and these ants are known as polygynous. Pregnant queen ants will come together and form really large colonies. Some species even allow the joining of forces, where separate, unrelated colonies of the same species can actually come together and form a big super colony. I believe these ghost ants are like that, much like their cousins Tapinoma sessile, which are known as Argentine ants. It seems both Argentine ants and these ants have completely taken over the world and formed a global super colony.

Now, I’ve got these guys set up in an AntsCanada Tetramorium Hybrid Nest, and it seems they’ve picked their favorite room in the nest off to the side. I find they all just kind of huddle together. Sometimes they’ll transfer rooms, or they’ll break up into two groups, but generally, it seems they all stay together in the same chamber. You can see there they’ve got a lot of brood going, and in just the couple of weeks that I’ve had them, it seems their colony has grown.

What I like about ghost ants is they are super, super tiny—about 1 mm to 2 mm in length. If any of you guys have kept really tiny ants, you’ll know that even a small formicarium is like a mansion for these guys! You may also notice that their formicarium is attached to an AC Outworld here—very bare, very basic because, as tiny ants, I don’t want them nesting in any unforeseen areas and crevices. So I’ve kept their Outworld bare at the moment. Based on their size, it seems like they’re not willing to travel too, too far, so I’ve been feeding them through a test tube, which attaches directly to their Hybrid Nest. They’ve been having a steady diet of sweets, especially honey—they love honey—and cockroaches.

Now, one of the things I noticed about ghost ants when feeding is that you would expect, with a ton of workers existing in the colony, that there would be a whole bunch of workers coming out as soon as there’s new food. You know, a big swarm of workers coming and feeding and feasting on food that they’ve discovered. But these ghost ants, unlike other ants that I’ve kept, seem to send only just a few workers out, and they don’t all feed at once. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s a small colony still, but when I observe them feeding, I see that they only have about five, six, or seven ants max feeding from a single food source that they found outside. It’s really interesting. Then, when the ants are done feeding, they head back to the colony and let other members know, and these ants come outside to enjoy the morsel as well.

Now, ghost ants are called ghost ants because it seems like half of their body is transparent. They’re kind of just like floating heads. Their gasters are a really light, pale yellow, but if they were to eat colored food, you would be able to see the color through their bodies. These ants do best in a moderately dry nest but require a place of moisture somewhere in the nest so that they don’t dry out. As really tiny ants, that’s a danger.

Now, as you can see, like all ants, they can get quite dirty. They’ve established their bathroom area in the room adjacent to the place that they’re all hanging out. My hopes for this colony are that they continue to grow in numbers and get so big that I can attach other formicariums to the setup and eventually, over time, have a network of formicariums all attached together. Let’s see, guys, how big these colonies can get! I’ll be sure to continue to update you guys on this colony.

So, if you live anywhere these guys are native to, or anywhere that their cousins, the Argentine ants, live, I say check them out! They’re pretty fun to watch, and the fact that they have multiple queens is also pretty neat. And there you guys have it—ghost ants, Tapinoma melanocephalum. A very cool species. I hope you guys get to see them one day! They move like this if you ever go vacationing to the tropics or something. They’re pantropical, which means they’re found in almost all tropical places—they’re hard to miss.

So, before we begin this Q&A session, I wanted to thank you guys so much for 50,000 subscribers on YouTube! Thank you, thank you, thank you so much! It’s pretty neat to see that there are at least 50,000 ant lovers out there, right? And the number is continuing to grow. It really fulfills my ant heart that ant love is really perpetuating, at least on YouTube.

So here we go! I know you guys love these Q&A sessions. And, you know, as someone who’s been, I guess, keeping ants for a long time, some of the most obvious questions escape my mind. You know, we create videos on different aspects of ant keeping, but because it’s all normal to me, I forget some of the most basic questions that some of you beginner ant keepers might have. So this is why these Q&A sessions are great. Let’s get started!

So, let’s get started on our AntsCanada Facebook page. We have Braden Rumble, who wrote to us:

“Hey there, I have seen plenty of your videos on YouTube, and they are very helpful. I was wondering if you could help me with something. I just found a nest of ants living in the garage and have sorted them into a bucket. Firstly, could you identify them for me? And secondly, why can I see around 10 queen ants in there? I’ve included a picture for you. Also, what formicarium in your range do you recommend to go with a colony of this size?”

Well, thank you, Braden, for that question. He’s also included some photos of the ants, and, sad to say, I actually don’t know what species that is. I checked Braden’s profile, and it seems he’s from Australia, and I have very little experience with Australian ants. So, what I do recommend is that you go to our Ant Forum, which you can get to through our antscanada.com website, post those photos there, and don’t forget to include the body length and location.

Here’s one of the things that a lot of people make the mistake of doing, and that’s asking someone to identify your ants without providing any supplementary information. In order to accurately identify your ant species, even just the genus, we need information like where you caught it, where you live, the body length of the ant, and other relevant information like “the abdomen glows a beautiful golden color”—things like that. As many details as you can!

I often get a lot of customer service emails asking me to identify their ants, but they don’t give me enough information, so I end up asking, “Where are they from? What’s the body length?” This and that, because it’s really important. There are thousands and thousands of species of ants, and a lot of them look exactly the same, so we need that excess information. And, you know, if you ask a lot of the senior myrmecologists to identify your ant species and you don’t provide that information, they get really upset. You know, and it makes sense. I mean, these guys are actually paid to identify ant species, and it’s a very painstaking process where they often have to look at the ant’s hair patterns, segments, and anatomy. And it’s really, really a difficult process, so please provide clear photos as well, up-close body length, the place you caught it, and this and that.

So, based on your photo, I don’t know what species that is, Braden, and yes, there are many queens. As you may have watched in this video, there are some ants that have multiple queens in their colony, and they’re known as polygynous ants. And this ant species that you have here is a polygynous species, so congratulations on them! Please send us photos as you continue to keep them.

As for your question about which formicarium in the AntsCanada line of formicariums I recommend, I would suggest either the “All You Need” Hybrid Nest or the one we’re using, which is a Tetramorium Hybrid Nest. Why? Because they’re designed for smaller ants. It seems like those ants are a bit smaller, and they offer a 50% hydration rate, so it can be either drier or more moist, depending on what you find your ants prefer.

Okay, now moving on to YouTube, we have questions from SoulSlicer9000:

“AntsCanada, I have a few questions:

1.Why did you choose to start an ant-keeping career, and what inspired you to make products and have a business?

2.You used to have lots of colonies; why did you get rid of them all? Did you sell them or release them?

3.Why do you only upload one video every two weeks on Mondays? P.S. I’m actually glad you upload on Mondays because I hate Mondays, and watching your videos makes my day. Thank you!

4.What, in your opinion, is your favorite species of ant? P.S. I love your vids. Hope you keep uploading.”

Thank you so much, SoulSlicer, great questions!

Okay, so to answer your first question: Why did you choose to start ant keeping as a career, and what inspired you to make products and have a business? Well, I actually did it for fun. You know, I was keeping ants for fun. I was really inspired by watching ant videos online from European ant keepers, and I thought to myself, “Why isn’t it big in other places like in, say, Australia or in North America?” And this was way back in 2009, so I decided to create an ant channel, which started getting a lot of views. People were asking me, “Hey, where do we get formicariums?” At the time, I was making my formicariums in my parents’ basement in Toronto, where I lived, and I said, “Hey, maybe I can make you guys some.”

For those who were asking for formicariums, I offered to sell them. Back then, they were just really basic formicariums that I had made out of grout, and I had made one out of plaster, and it turned out to be pretty successful. More and more people around the world started ordering, and I decided to open a website, and it just became a business. Now, it has grown to the point where it’s completely taken over my life, and we ship to over 40 countries. We continue to research and improve our products to deliver to the ant community around the world—better and better ant products for you guys. It really just kind of happened by accident, I suppose, and I’m glad it did. We all have ant love!

To answer your second question: You used to have a lot of colonies; why did you get rid of them all? Did you sell them or release them? Yes, you may have noticed if you’ve been watching my channel for a while, I have new colonies, and then I end up not having them, and then I get new ones, and then they grow. What I do is, I like to acquire a queen or a small colony, and I enjoy growing them to a certain size. When I feel like I’ve had enough, you know, I’ve learned about them, I’ll pass them along to someone else who wants them, or I’ll release them back into the wild where they came from.

For me, it’s not so much the collecting of the ants that I like. I know a lot of people like to have a huge collection of different species—all the species in their area—and that’s cool too. But for me, I prefer to have the experience and learn about each species. That, to me, is more valuable. Just growing the colony from a single queen to a fully mature colony—that, to me, is enough.

Your third question: Why do you only upload every two weeks on Mondays? Well, you actually answered my question. I chose Mondays because I remember when I was going to school hating Mondays, you know? I hated Mondays because you go back to school, and it’s after the weekend. So, I figured, “Hey, you know what? Most of our viewers are students or they’re studying, and they hate Mondays, so let’s upload on Mondays so that they have something to look forward to.”

Now, why every two weeks? Well, because these videos take a lot of time, and I’m currently answering all AntsCanada emails, which also takes a lot of time. Keeping up with the business really does demand a lot of my time. Eventually, we may be able to expand, especially on our video production team, and we might be able to deliver more than one video—who knows? That would be great! But for now, once every two weeks is a great time period, especially for most of our subscribers. It seems that it takes them about one or two weeks to catch up on some of our previous videos, because not everybody can watch videos every day.

Your final question was: What, in your opinion, is your favorite species of ant? I would say Camponotus novaeboracensis, one, because they were a great species to observe—they were just really large. I didn’t need a magnifying glass or anything, so I could really see what was going on. I could even watch the queen lay eggs and film the queen laying eggs, which was kind of cool. They don’t sting, so working around them was a breeze. They were polymorphic, which means they had workers of different sizes, which was also very cool, and they ate a lot! There was a lot of action, and they were easy to grow. They were, I think, my favorite species of ant.

They were, I think, my favorite species of ant. Probably tied in second would be Tetramorium sp. E. They were also very rewarding ants to keep. And then, of course, I love Weaver ants—that was a blast to keep. And Solenopsis geminata, super challenging to keep but also a great experience. So, any of those four species are my favorites.

Okay, moving on to the AntsCanada Instagram page—oh, by the way, we have an Instagram page, follow us on Instagram; it’s @AntsCanada!

Alright, first question on Instagram comes from Rudy Downey: “How much food do you give to hibernating ants?”

Well, a very good question, but you don’t need to feed them! Hibernating ants really just hibernate; they don’t do anything. They usually don’t move, and if they do, it’s really sluggish. But they don’t need food at all. What they do need is moisture and water, so if you’re hibernating them in a test tube, you don’t have to worry. But if you’re hibernating your ants in their formicarium, you have to make sure the formicarium doesn’t dry out.

But one of the great things about formicariums that are cold (assuming you’re hibernating them in a cold place) is that they lose water slower, so you don’t have to water them as often as you would in summer. So, no feeding—let them sleep.

SVM_Peters_Capital says: “I have a problem with mold within my test tube setup, and I don’t know how to move over the colony to another tube without shaking them out.”

Okay, I get this question a lot, actually. So, what you have to do is you have to create a new test tube setup, and the traditional way is to join the old moldy setup with the new setup, tape it, and then just kind of wait for them to move. They’ll know when to move, and when it’s dangerous, they’ll just move on their own. They’ll even move their own brood. And if there are workers in there, the process is easier.

But you could also speed up this process by wrapping a heating cable—a reptile heating cable—around the old tube so that the heat causes them to move. An even easier method for this is to take your new test tube setup and your dirty test tube setup and attach it to what we call an AntsCanada Test Tube Portal. And what this does is it creates a kind of bridge between your old test tube and the new test tube, and the ants can move on their own. You don’t have to worry about the ants running out of air because if you tape it up, you usually have to open it every couple of days so that air can get in. But with this new AntsCanada Test Tube Portal, it allows them to move easily. So, check that out too on our site.

It also helps, of course, to shine a light on the old test tube and to keep the new test tube dark.

Next question comes from Quino5e: “I want to start catching a queen. Where can I get test tubes? Where do you get them?”

Okay, AntsCanada.com—we sell great test tubes. They’re very spacious; they’re made of plastic, so if they drop, they won’t break, and they fit directly into our Hybrid Nests and a lot of our joint pieces, like the accessories, say the Test Tube Adapter or our Test Tube Portal. So, I say order them from our site; they’re really cheap, and we get them to you ASAP.

But if you’re on a budget, you can also visit your local floral shop and ask for what they call water picks. And what they are is like plastic test tubes that fit at the bottom of a flower bouquet, and it keeps the flower bouquet moist and hydrated. You can use those. They even come with a little cap, and they usually go for anywhere between 10 cents to 75 cents max, so they’re very, very cheap and affordable. They’re kind of like the ant keeper’s secret for emergency test tubes.

Scuba_ants asks: “How long does it take for an ant colony to reach numbers that can be moved into a formicarium?”

This is such a good question, Scuba_ants, thanks for asking it. I get this question a lot, and I find one of the biggest mistakes people make is they’ve spent several months farming a colony of ants in their test tube, and they have about five workers, and then they move them into a formicarium. This is a big no-no, guys.

If you can, please try to raise the colony until—even if it takes a year or two—it fills up that test tube, 20 workers minimum, or if you can, even have it completely packed before you move them into the formicarium. This ensures, guys, that your ants make it. If the colony is really small—say five workers, three workers, even like possibly eight or ten workers—that might be too small of a colony to move into a large formicarium. A large formicarium is spacious, which means it’s more airy. Hydration is easier to fluctuate and be crazy, you know?

Whereas in a test tube, in a sealed test tube, like in the wild, say a claustral chamber under the ground, the humidity level is very constant, and so is temperature. But in a large formicarium, you can’t really control these fluctuations as much as you can in a test tube, so ants end up dying. Colonies that you’ve been raising for, say, two or three months end up dying, and it’s really sad because a lot of ant keepers are in a hurry to move their ants into a formicarium. But I say wait until they have a good army force first—a good worker force—so that they can take care of the brood.

If you have a digging medium in your formicarium or Outworld, they can use that digging medium, you know, that sand to create walls and kind of customize the inside of the formicarium so that the hydration is exactly how the colony needs it at that stage of time. So, my answer is: wait until the test tube looks crowded.

Moving on now to our AntsCanada Twitter page from Tor_Mattiga: “Question is: It’s a challenge to find test tubes, so I use syringes. Is the diameter too big? The smaller one is too short.”

I’m looking at your photo, and it seems like it’s functioning like a normal test tube. The only issue I see with this is in a test tube, the water portion is held in place because there’s suction. Now, I see on the side that you have the water portion—it’s plugged—but I wonder if air is getting in there. Because if it is, you risk flooding in your syringe. That’s my only fear. If air bubbles are getting in from the other end, not the cotton end, but from that rubber stopper end, you may come home one day to your ants flooded and dead. So that’s the only danger I see with this setup. I see it functions like a normal test tube setup, so if it works for you, good on you, but keep an eye on them.

Alright, guys, this video is super, super long now. Thank you so much for watching. Please visit us at AntsCanada.com for all of your ant-keeping needs, for any ant-keeping products. Also, if you need ant colonies, be sure to visit our GAN Project; it’s under “Queen Ants for Sale” at AntsCanada.com. We sell ants in several key cities and key states in the US, so check that out.

And also, if you have ants that you would like to sell, please join the GAN Project as a GAN farmer. It’s very simple, easy to join, and free. Finally, we also have a helpful Ant Forum at AntsCanada.com that you can join and connect with tons of ant keepers all over the world. There’s a section for creating journals, so be sure to check that out, and you can learn from other people who are keeping ants.

Please feel free to share! We’re all there because we love ants, and you can totally talk about ants all day long and read about ants. Thanks again for watching, guys. See you! Bye!

Thanks, guys, so much for watching our new video on ghost ants and the Q&A session. Be sure to subscribe to our channel if you liked what you saw. We upload a video every first and third Monday of the month, so don’t miss any of our ant videos. Also, be sure to check out our very helpful Ant Tutorial Playlist. It’s a very helpful playlist if you’re a beginning ant keeper or if you just like watching ants.

Check out our cool Solenopsis geminata playlist! Finally, don’t forget to visit us, guys, at the AntsCanada Ant Store at www.AntsCanada.com. We’ve got tons of ant-keeping products and lots of great information there for you to read. You can also buy and sell queen ants in your area, as well as join our great Ant Forum. Ant love forever, guys! Good luck on all your anting!