Most people in the world are looking for ways to kill carpneter ants. We ant keepers find them to be amazing pets to keep! This video is a tutorial on how to care for carpenter (Camponotus) ants as pets.

Carpenter Ants (Camponotus) | AntsCanada Tutorial

They’re huge! They’re found everywhere. They come in different shapes and sizes.

The workers are polymorphic [they vary in size] with huge super majors down to small minors.

Most people in the world are seeking ways to eradicate them because they’re notorious for the structural damage they cause in homes and buildings.

But for us ant lovers, these tough and well-built ants are a dream come true to keep as pets.

Presenting the infamous carpenter ants belonging to the highly complex genus known as Camponotus.

Now, I’ve waited for this day to release this video because I know so many of you in North America, Europe, and Asia managed to catch Camponotus queens during their nuptial flights this year, and many of you guys are starting to welcome your very first nanitics, your first round of workers in your founding test tubes.

Congratulations, by the way!

So, I wanted to create a video on how to care for Camponotus ants and give you a background on them so you know what to expect and be pro-Camponotus ant keepers.

Today’s episode is about how to keep carpenter ants as pets.

Let’s start by taking a look at carpenter ant biology. For ant taxonomists, i.e., those guys whose job it is to name and classify ant species, Camponotus is an extremely large and complex genus. At present, there are more than 1,000 species and nearly 500 subspecies belonging to 45 subgenera of carpenter ants.

According to Wikipedia, it could well be the largest ant genus of all.

Take a look at this list. Look at how many species belong to the genus Camponotus!

Amazing, right? Now, it should be noted that only a small handful of these ants are the ones you find in your homes as pests.

The rest are found in various other habitats: forests, deserts, mountainous regions, tropical rainforests.

In fact, take a look at this map, which shows all the areas where Camponotus ants can be found. They’re globally distributed and are found in almost all areas of the world. Where I live in Toronto, Canada, the most common carpenter ants are black carpenter ants, also known as Camponotus pennsylvanicus, and my favorite, the red and black carpenter ants, Camponotus novaeboracensis. There are so many kinds of carpenter ant species, and it can be tricky to identify them with accuracy if you’re not privy to ant classification.

But lucky for us ant keepers, the care of most commonly kept carpenter ants is very similar, if not the same.

Let’s start with housing. What you house your carpenter ants in depends on what stage of colony development they’re at.

So, let’s start with when you first catch your carpenter ant queen. If you’ve been a subscriber to this channel for quite some time, you already know the first step when you catch your queen ant is to place her into a test tube setup.

The test tube setup is the best and surefire way to get your carpenter ant colony started and not a formicarium right off the bat. For a tutorial on how to create a test tube setup, click the icon appearing here now.

Carpenter ant queens are fully claustral, so they don’t need any food. You don’t need to feed them during this stage when they are raising their first set of workers.

All she needs is peace and quiet.

Now, I know most of you currently have your Camponotus queens that you caught earlier this year in your test tube setups and are 100% eager to grow your big carpenter ant colonies and move them into a formicarium.

But I do have some potentially sad news: you shouldn’t move your colony into a formicarium until they reach 20 to 50 workers, and this may take up to a year.

A year, you ask? Why so long?

Okay. There are two reasons. One: because Camponotus are such large ants, they take longer to develop than most ants. It takes two months for a carpenter ant to go from egg to worker.

And reason two: Camponotus queens tend to lay eggs in batches, taking periodic breaks of a few weeks or months between egg-laying batches.

Carpenter ant queens do not lay eggs around the clock like some ants, so for these two reasons, owners of Camponotus ants usually won’t get to move their colony into a formicarium until year two.

It’s a pretty long process, so let me go over the typical Camponotus timeline. You catch a queen around June.

She lays around ten or so eggs over the next few weeks, which she cares for and raises into workers for two months. By the time winter comes around and all colony growth stops for hibernation, you may only have anywhere between 5 to 20 workers. You may even possibly have zero workers and just developing brood. And no, you can’t trick your ants into thinking it’s still summer by keeping them warm in the winter because they run on a biological clock, which tells them when to shut down for the winter.

For more on hibernating your ants, guys, click on this icon for a tutorial on hibernation and how to hibernate your ants properly.

Now, if your colony is lucky enough to have 20 or more workers before winter comes, you can move them into a formicarium at this point. But it’s suggested you hibernate them in a test tube setup for their first winter because conditions are better and more stable for the new colony in a test tube setup than in a formicarium over the winter. Throughout winter, they will be hibernating in your test tube—not eating, moving, or developing, and the queen is not egg-laying. And then when spring rolls around, the queen will start to slowly egg-lay again in batches. When the colony reaches 20 to 50 workers, for most of you, this will be around May or June. Only then should you move them into a formicarium. But by then, this is around their one-year anniversary of you catching them. Now, by the time winter of year two comes around, your colony should have anywhere between 30 to 200 workers.

Again, hibernation of non-activity and growth passes, and then by year 3, that is when you start to see the population explosion into the thousands. It’s in this third year that the majors also appear and possibly alates.

Two years… Now, I know that might seem like quite a long wait for a colony to grow to an impressive size, but believe me, it’s definitely worth it, and time passes by so quickly as you enjoy the little joys along the way, like when your first worker arrives when your small colony has its first meal—a cricket leg or a tiny drop of honey—watching your workers help unwrap a cocoon casing often enclosing an ant, catching your queen laying an egg as seen here, and just generally watching your colony go from just the queen to a colony of thousands.

This truly is what the ant-keeping experience is all about, and you’ll appreciate and love your colony much more. By the way, just a note, guys: this wait time is less for those living in tropical areas where Camponotus are. Obviously, because these ant keepers don’t have to deal with the hibernation period. The colonies just grow year-round.

Either way, Camponotus ants, due to their slow development compared to other types of ants, require a lot of patience. If you’re the impatient type, perhaps Camponotus ants aren’t for you. Or perhaps you can manage to chop up some logs and find colonies in their first or second year of development. This can be challenging, however, and the chances of injuring the queen are super high. In my opinion, raising your colony from the start, from just a single queen, is the best and most fulfilling way versus collecting a wild colony at the risk of killing that colony in the process.

So, if you’re looking to purchase a professional formicarium at our shop when your colony reaches 20 to 40 workers, I highly recommend the Omni Nest or an all-unique Camponotus hybrid gear pack. The links to those items are in the video description box below. In terms of nest hydration, carpenter ants are generally moderately dry-loving ants. I say moderately because they do need moisture in their nest, but they don’t do well in wet nests. I recommend giving them a sort of hydration gradient where only a small part of the nest is moist while the majority of the nest is dry. Keep in mind that although an area of a formicarium may look dry to us, it usually still holds a certain degree of humidity and moisture. So don’t get too water-happy with these ants. If you’re keeping your ants in one of our Camponotus hybrid nests, then you don’t have to worry too much about getting their hydration right, as the humidified areas are already laid out perfectly to fit their preferences. Just water once every five days to a week.

These ants do well in a formicarium with pre-made tunnels and don’t necessarily need to burrow in wood. Speaking of which, contrary to what most people think, these ants don’t actually eat wood. They actually lack the digestive microflora in their gut to digest cellulose like termites can. Instead, carpenter ants burrow and break off wood fibers piece by piece until they create extensive galleries and tunnels.

Another thing to note is that your colony will grow and develop much faster when heated, so if you can place your colony in a warm room in your home that isn’t air-conditioned, or if you can heat your colony with a reptile heating cable, this will speed up their growth. Only heat up one side of the nest, not the whole nest, so your ants can thermoregulate and choose where they prefer to stay based on their needs and those of the young. For those of you with hybrid nests, you place the heating cable here, and you don’t have to worry.

In terms of their outworld, these ants will benefit from a large outworld or multiple outworlds connected together. They love to travel far distances to forage for food. Place all their food directly in their outworld, and they’ll leave their garbage and dead in a pile somewhere in their world for you to clean. Be sure to clean up after them regularly. As a barrier to put along the top of the outworld, I use Vaseline without problems, but you can also use baby powder mixed with rubbing alcohol and paint this mixture along the top of your outworld.

Now, let’s go over diet. What do carpenter ants eat? The carpenter ants’ diet consists of both a protein food source in the form of freshly killed insects like mealworms, super worms, crickets, and feeder cockroaches, and they also need carbohydrates in the form of sugars like honey, sugar water, or hummingbird nectar, and fresh fruits. In the wild, carpenter ants will eat dead or living insects, honeydew from aphids, sweet plant exudates, and other foods. It’s best to offer a wide variety of foods to your ants and not just one food source, so your ants get all the nutrients they need. Don’t forget your ants also need a fresh supply of water offered via a test tube at all times.

Another thing I really love about carpenter ants, besides the fact that they are so big and I don’t need a magnifying glass to really see what’s going on, is the fact that carpenter ants are polymorphic. This means that the workers come in all shapes and sizes. Carpenter ant workers can be really small, also known as miners, which are often associated with taking care of brood and nest duties. But carpenter ants can also have huge majors and super majors with huge heads specializing in cutting things up. You can expect majors in your colony after they’ve reached over a hundred workers or so, which means usually by year two or three. The super majors, the really big workers, arrive a bit later if fed an ample amount of food and protein.

Your carpenter ant colony will start to produce alates by the second or third year. Don’t worry, though, these alates fail to fly in captivity because they lack the environmental cues needed for nuptial flights to happen. But if you like, assuming you caught your Camponotus ants in your area, you can leave your ant setup somewhere outside, perhaps in a shaded area to protect it from the elements, and leave your outworld top open for your alates to fly out and mate during nuptial flight season. The carpenter ant species that most ant keepers catch are also native species, so doing so would be great for the propagation of the species and good for the environment.

Thanks so much for watching this video on how to care for Camponotus ants. I wish you much luck on these amazing pet ants, and I know you’ll become as much of a fan as I am of carpenter ants. What other types of ants would you like me to create care videos on like this one? Let me know in the comments section. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to this video. Like, share, and leave me a comment because I love reading your comments, and I respond to as many of them as I can. And stay tuned for our next video next Monday, because we release a video every single week now. Thanks so much, guys. Bye-bye!

Thanks so much for watching our video. Don’t forget to subscribe to this channel as I said before. Hit that subscribe button. We release a video every single Monday. If you’re new to ants, check out our ant tutorial playlist. It’s great; it’s got all the ant-keeping basics, and if you like watching big colonies, check out our awesome Solenopsis geminata playlist. And for all your ant-keeping needs, guys, visit us at AntsCanada.com. We’ve got lots of information there for you. We’ve got a helpful forum full of thousands of members from all over the world who are keeping ants. I recommend you guys read their journals and contribute if you have ant colonies. And also, if you have ants to sell or you’re looking for ants to buy, check out our GAN project. We have ant farmers in different cities all over the world selling ants in their city, and you too can help ant keepers in your area by selling them or giving them colonies that you can no longer care for or extra colonies in your collection. Take care. It’s ant love forever!