Ants, Little But Mighty

Ants, Little but Mighty

What is an ant? Ants are insects, they have six legs and each leg has three joints. Ants legs are very strong.

With it’s little legs it can lift twenty-five time its own body weight. They have two stomachs. One stomach holds its food, and the second holds food to be shared with other ants. The out side of their body is covered with a hard armor. This is called the exoskeleton. Ants have four growing stages, the egg, larva, pupa, and the adult. There are over 100,000 known species of ants. Each ant colony has at least one or more queens.

The queens job is to lay eggs. How does she start her colony? Well in the spring all the males and young winged queens leave there nest and fly high in the air and mate.

The few ant queens that survive this “marriage flight” cast off there wings and instinctively begin to look for a spot to start a new ant colony.

After making a nest, the young queen ant seals off the entrance and begins to lay eggs. Some of the first batch are eaten by the queen for nourishment. When the surviving eggs hatch they become like larvae. After a few weeks each larva spins a cocoon around itself and pupates. In a few more weeks, adult workers emerge. It is their job to hunt for food and make the nest bigger.

More workers will develop and the colony gets very organized. The new workers will completely take over as caretakers of the eggs, larvae, and pupae. Now the queens only duty is to lay more and more eggs, thousands of them in her lifetime. Many wingless workers develop and help to enlarge the nest into an intricate network of tunnels and chambers that will eventually house thousands of ants.

When the colony becomes well established, the queen begins to lay some eggs that develop into queens and males. It takes a few years before a colony becomes large enough to send out winged males and young queens to start new colonies. The cycle will now begin all over again.

Ant nests come in all shapes and sizes. One tropical species built a nest that extended forty feet below the surface of the ground. Another species built a nets that covered an area the size of a tennis court. Ants know the best time to build a nest, that’s after it rains. The damp soil is easier to work with. Their are many chambers in an ants nest. Some rooms are used to store the food. Some are used for storage of ant eggs.