Appearance and Features
It is not for nothing that the queen of the anthill occupies the highest place in the hierarchy of insects in her nest. After all, it is thanks to it that the ant population increases. Forest black and red ants have a single queen in the settlement. She does not take part in obtaining food and generally does not leave the anthill anywhere, focusing exclusively on the production of offspring. But in domestic red insects, ant queens can live several individuals in each colony, without conflicting with each other.
Ant queen
As can be seen in the photo of the uterus of house ants, in appearance it is very different from working individuals in its size and body structure: it is 2 times larger than them and can reach a length of 4-4.5 mm, its chest is much wider due to the presence of flight muscles, color The body is dark brown, with light red bandages visible on the back of the round abdomen.
Due to its size, the queen is very clumsy and less mobile compared to working ants; she practically does not leave the nest, regularly accepting food from others and replenishing the supply of eggs. Therefore, it is almost impossible to get it from the depths of the anthill.
Interesting!
Young females are initially born and grow up with small wings, like the queen ant in the photo, which has not yet had time to shed them. After the colony is founded, these parts either fall off on their own, or they are nibbled off and eaten, thus obtaining additional food.
Young unfertilized queens with wings
What to feed ants at home?
Of course, harvester ants can exist peacefully if they are fed with poppy and sunflower seeds, but in the presence of protein, the family develops much faster, and the individuals are larger in size.
What to feed ants at home:
- Don't be surprised if the first insects are small. This is understandable, since the queen spends her own energy feeding and raising them, which may not be enough. The next generation will be larger due to additional feeding.
- Add grains from time to time, and do not forget about dead insects. These could be small cockroaches, worms, or mosquitoes. This food can be found at any pet store or ordered online. Nowadays, keeping a formicarium is quite popular; finding food for ants should not be a problem.
- Buy food in special stores. Canary mixture is also suitable.
Ants
Anthill growth and the role of queens
According to biologists, it is the queen ant that helps regulate the population of the colony. When the nest is small, she marks the laid eggs with pheromones that block sexual development, which is why they only produce workers. However, as the size of the colony increases after the queen emerges, the pheromones she produces are no longer sufficient, the eggs develop normally, and more females are hatched.
The anthill gradually grows and begins to divide into groups that move nearby, constantly maintaining relationships with the main nest: queens can move between nests, and ants can exchange food. Below is a photo of a queen ant near the eggs and workers.
Gel farm
This is perhaps the case when this activity will be very interesting for children, and of course for adults as well.
For such a farm you need a flat container that can be closed with a lid and gelatin. You need to take 3 bags of gelatin (15 grams each), pour 0.5 liters of hot water and stir well until the gelatin completely melts. Next, we pour the mixture into a container, wait until it cools down and put it in the refrigerator until it hardens completely. We take it out of the refrigerator and wait until the gel reaches normal room temperature, and that’s it, the filler is ready. Remember that this filler is also food for goosebumps, so you don’t need to feed them.
How to detect the queen and nests
The small red ants that a person sees in his apartment or house are just working individuals, scurrying around in search of food for the entire colony. Their destruction will have virtually no positive effect, because in a short time the number of emerging young people will fill this gap. To completely defeat pests, you should search for their nests.
Knowing what the queen of ants looks like, in order to completely neutralize the pests that have settled in the house, it is necessary to find and destroy all the nests and all the queens living there.
The most likely places for the settlement of pharaoh red ants are warm, damp areas in the kitchen, bathroom, and darkened and hard-to-reach places are chosen: cracks between tiles, the space near electrical outlets, channels through which electrical wiring runs, etc. Ants often establish colonies between floors in ceilings. Observing the movement paths of insects will help to facilitate the search, because they carry prey exactly to their “home”.
Ants and queen
On a note!
How to find the queen ant among a large number of ants: in the nest you should look for the largest and singlest individuals. Young females also have wings. If access to the found anthill is free, then you can use a regular vacuum cleaner to destroy it.
It is very difficult to get all the queens out of the anthill, so it is best to use chemical methods. It is necessary to treat the entire colony with insecticidal agents: aerosol or spray, use gels, poisonous baits or folk remedies.
Features of feeding
At home, reapers eat sunflower, poppy or pumpkin seeds. In addition, you can take a canary mixture, the ingredients of which are cereals and seeds of various types of vegetation. You should not choose grain intended for sowing, since it is treated with special compounds that have a detrimental effect on ants - there is a risk of death.
You can purchase mealworms, cockroaches or crickets as protein foods. Please note that chicken meat and yolk also have a negative effect on insects.
To organize a drinking bowl for ants, buy a small test tube, then fill it with water and tightly close the hole with cotton wool - it will be moistened with water and will become an excellent source of liquid in the formicarium. Please note that the plug must be changed when dirty, as there is a risk of mold developing inside the farm.
How to catch?
For those who are interested in how to catch a queen ant and make an incubator for her, we can recommend preparing a long glass flask with cotton wool soaked in a small amount of water. You can search for the queen purposefully, waiting for the moment when the young emerge from an anthill in the forest, or you can find it on the street completely by accident.
For the incubator, it is best to find ant queens that have already shed their wings, which means they are fertilized and are looking for a place for their colony. You should catch it carefully, do not pick it up, but push it with a branch or blade of grass towards the flask.
Having placed an insect in an incubator, after a few days you can observe how the queen lays eggs, and then, after a certain time, larvae and workers are formed. Observing the life and behavior of ants will allow you to see their division into castes. According to scientists, it is precisely this social hierarchy in the anthill that allows them to be considered the most developed order of insects in the world, resistant to adverse natural phenomena.
Reaper ants: maintenance and care at home
Your goal is to place the tube containing the queen bee in a dark place and check once a week. In about a month, the family will increase in size. On average, you will see about 30 new individuals in one month. Later, the insects will begin to develop much faster, because the queen will have assistants who will look after the new eggs, feed them and take out the trash.
Reaper ants, maintenance and care at home:
- To develop a colony, you need a cozy formicarium or farm with a large number of passages. Do not rush to open all the compartments at once, freeing them gradually as your family grows. This is necessary so that the ants do not get lost.
- Excessive space can cause death, severe stress, which will negatively affect the strength of the family. Ants need constant moisture. Despite the fact that reapers live in the steppes, where it is quite dry, they still choose places where moisture accumulates. Therefore, be sure to put cotton wool soaked in water into the chamber to maintain high humidity. Do not place the truss near a window, on a windowsill, or in places where there is a draft. Ants do not live well on the balcony. Choose a cozy, shady place where little insects will disturb you.
Goosebumps
What is the lifestyle of a female
Females that are unable to fertilize become workers. There can be up to 150 queens in one anthill. The guilty individual will be killed by his fellows. Flight for mating occurs in the summer. By this time, young individuals hatch, capable of fertilization and having wings for further flight and creation of a new anthill.
Females have wings
Each female is fertilized only once. The stored seed is sufficient for further repeated reproduction of offspring. The fertilization fluid is stored in a special bag and is consumed throughout the life cycle.
After flying and mating, the queen can create a new colony or return back to the anthill. A chamber is being constructed to store the ovipositor. The life of ants lasts on average 22 years.
Reproduction
Living conditions even affected the breeding habits of reapers. Most ants raise sexually mature individuals by late spring or early summer. Reapers emerge in late summer, spend the winter in the nest, and begin breeding in April. This gives them the opportunity to build an anthill under favorable conditions, while the steppe soil is not dry and the ambient temperature is not yet so high.
Each harvester ant nest contains one queen. At the stage of nest formation there may be several of them, but then the ants expel or eat the extra ones. The males, having fertilized the female, die.
The harvester ant is an insect with a full development cycle: egg, larva, pupa, adult. The first three stages take up to 2-3 weeks each. Reaper ants are characterized by two methods of reproduction: asexual and sexual. Asexual is represented by parthenogenesis, it leads to the birth of worker ants. In the sexual method, males and females are born.
Habitat
The steppe harvester ant is a resident of the steppes and deserts. Its nests can be found in the countries of the Mediterranean coast, Southern and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Middle and Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. On the territory of Russia, in the Republic of Tatarstan, the species is included in the Red Book due to the threat of extinction.
Years
Reapers are ants of deserts and steppes. Such a life developed an interesting feature in them. Almost all species of ants we encounter raise young males and females in the spring, so that by the end of spring or summer they can fly away and give rise to new colonies. The Messors have a completely different strategy: young individuals capable of reproducing are raised not in May, but in August. Next, the winged generation overwinters in its native anthill and flies out by the end of April. At a time when the queens of other ants are still in the larval state, messoras are already beginning to raise the first generation of new workers. It would seem, why such oddities? The answer is simple: in steppes and semi-deserts, the most favorable conditions for the creation of new colonies appear in the spring, when the average daily temperature is not so high and soil moisture remains.
General information about the genus Messor
The genus Messor includes 110 species of ants adapted to life in the desert zone on almost all continents. Thus, 30 species live in Europe alone, 5 of them in Russia. This:
- Messor aciculatus;
- Messor denticulatus;
- Messor kasakorum;
- Messor rufitarsis;
- Messor constructor.
The genus received the name Messor (reaper) due to the method of collecting grain from the fields. The specificity of nutrition is determined by the nature of vegetation in the desert climate. According to research, ants from one family are able to bring up to 1.5 kg of grain to underground storage facilities. The answer to the question: is the harvester ant a pest that steals the fruits of human labor should be answered in the negative. He harvests his harvest only from the ground, from already damaged spikelets. The grains are stored in moist underground chambers for a long time and periodically germinate. Then the ants chew off the seedlings, and the seeds themselves are ground into powder, moistened with saliva and fed to the larvae.
Reaper ants have their own characteristics:
- large size of individuals;
- peacefulness;
- swarming, nest building in spring.
Let us consider this genus in more detail using the example of the species Messor structor (steppe harvester ant).
Some interesting facts
- Some of the species of these arthropods can remain under water without access to air for 4 days, as if in a preserved state. Once removed from the liquid, they come to life again and continue to exist.
- The ant's legs (there are 6 of them, and each has 3 joints) are very strong. They seem to be designed by nature for heavy work and moving loads. By the way, if this insect were as tall as humans, then, in proportion to its physical characteristics, it could run at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour and lift loads of one and a half tons!
- Ants, according to some researchers, have a collective intelligence, and the total number of their brain cells (for a single anthill) is comparable to the number of the same cells in humans.
