"The Ant - Did You Know?"

• That their are more than 21,000 species of ants.  Ants can lift 20 time its own body weight. 

• Ants go though four stages of development - the egg, larva, pupa, and adult.

• Ants have three main parts - the head, the truck (middle section) and the rear or metasoma.  Many ants have poison sacks and/or stingers in the metasoma for defense against predators. 

• Ants have a pair of elbowed antennae (bent) on the head and constricted area between the thorax and abdomen called the petiole.  The petiole has either one or two nodes.

• The head of an Ant has a pair of large, scissor like strong jaws.  Adult ants can not chew and swallow solid food - Instead they swallow the juice that they squeeze from pieces of food - they trow away the dry part that's left over. 

• The ant has abdomen has two stomachs.  One holds the food for itself and the second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants.

•  They have six legs and each leg has three joints.

• Ants have two eyes, each eye have many smaller eyes, ants eyes are a lot like flies eyes, this is called compound eyes.

• Ants don't have ears - they "hear" by feeling vibrations on the ground and they use their antennae (feelers) for touch, to communicate, and sense of smell. 

• Ants don't have lungs - oxygen enters through tiny holes all over their body and carob dioxide leaves through the same holes. 

• Ants have no blood vessels, their heart is a long tube that pumps colorless blood from the head back to the rear and then back up to the head again.

• When ants search for food (foraging) ants leave a trail called pheromones so they know where they've been. 

• Ants are social insects.  They live in colonies.  Colonies consist of millions of ants.  The three kinds of ants in a colony are the Queen, the female workers, and the males.

• Ants build many different types of homes, they can build simple little mounds out of dirt or sand.  Other ants use small sticks mixed with dirt and sand to make the mound stronger.  Western Harvester ants make a small mound on top, but then tunnel up to 15 feet straight down to hibernate during winter.

• Ant mounds consist of many chambers connected by tunnels. Different chambers are used for nurseries, food storage, and resting places for the worker ants. Some ants live in wood like termites. Army ants don't make a home at all but travel in large groups searching for food.

• Some Queens can live for many of years and have millions of babies.  The Queen ants have wings they shed when they start a new nest.  When the Queen dies the colony can only survive a few months Queens are usually not replaced and the workers can't reproduce.

• Ants reproductive caste consists of both males and females. At certain seasons of the year ants produce many such reproductives. These include the "kings" and "queens" of future colonies. Unmated insects are called pre-reproductives and usually possess wings prior to leaving the colony. Pre-reproductives remain inside the nest for varying periods of times--sometimes for several months--waiting for the proper signals to leave the nest in search of new mates. When they emerge from the nest in large numbers they are said to swarm. The pre-reproductives are called swarmers at this time.

• Swarming is usually triggered by several environmental clues such as temperature, wind speed, relative humidity and day length. Carpenter Ants, Fire ants, Argentine ants, Pharaoh ants, for example, send out swarmers in the spring when the relative humidity is high and the wind speed is low. By using identical environmental cues to trigger swarming, ants increase the chances for their reproductives to encounter other swarmers of the same species.

• Swarming ants inside a house mean that there is an ant nest either inside, underneath or very close to the home. In most cases, if worker ants have not previously been a problem inside the home, the presence of swarming ants indoors should not be a cause for concern. Swarming typically lasts for only one day. This, and the fact that reproductive flights only occur once to a few times a year, means that a vacuum cleaner or one-time use of an indoor flying insect spray usually solves the problem.

• On the other hand, swarming ants may be evidence of an undesirable infestation. Pharaoh ants and carpenter ants are two ant species that can become chronic pests in a home or other structure. If a home has an infestation of either of these species, worker ants are most often continually present in the house.

• Swarming fire ants indoors usually indicate an outdoor nest adjacent to the building foundation. If fire ants swarm indoors, locate and treat the outdoor mound with a low-odor insecticide. Failure to treat fire ants next to your home may result in mass invasions of fire ant workers, especially during the hot summer months.

• Save any specimens you discover. The best way to preserve a specimen is to place it in a crush-proof container in alcohol (rubbing alcohol is fine), or put in a zip lock bag, or even tape the specimens to a white piece paper. Make a note of the date and which room it was collected from. This information will help when an inspection of your home. Many suspected termite infestations turn out, on close inspection, to be some other insect. If you find swarmers in your home give us a call and we can take a look and see what is going on.

• When ants fight - it's usually to the death.

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