How to Start an Ant Farm

The first thing you must do in order to have a great ant farm, is first decide what type of ant habitat you want. This is very important, because each ant habitat will give you a unique experience. If you want to go with the traditional ant farm, than the < > Vintage Ant Farm from Uncle Milton's Ant Farms will be the way to go. However, if you want to have a futuristic and visually stimulating ant farm, than you may want to go with the AntWorks Illuminated Ant Habitat. Both of these ant farms will give you a different experience, but there are also hundreds of other models out there that allow your ant farm to be as simplistic or complex as you want. And of course, there's always the option of building your own ant farm habitat.

After you have chosen your ant farm, you must then begin the task of gathering your ants. You can do this in two different ways. The first way of getting ants for your ant farm is to go to a pet store, either online or in your home town, and purchase ants from them. While some stores do not do this, others will have a great selection for you to choose from. If you want to purchase your ants online, make sure that they have a guarantee on their ants, just in case they arrive at your house harmed or even dead. However, there is another way that you can harvest your ants, which is completely free. All you need is a garden shovel, a bucket and your backyard.

Glance around your backyard and look for several ants, after you have found them, than you can follow them back to their colony where you can extract all of the other ants, including the queen, and place them in your ant farm. This task requires patience and an ability to carefully transplant the ants, however, if you're up for the challenge, it is a great way to acquire natural ants.

The next step in starting your ant farm is by carefully picking out food for your ants to eat. However, if you decided to go with a gel habitat, you will not have to water or feed your ants because all of the nutrition they need can be found within the gel. But for the traditional sand or soil ant farms, you must water your ants daily as well as feed them every 2 or 3 days. Make sure that you keep your ant farm slightly damp, especially if you have Carpenter Ants, which love damp areas, and keep the ant farm out of the sun. You will quickly find that if your ant farm dries out the ants will be dried out also and they can all be eliminated overnight, thus keeping the right amount of dampness and light on your ants is imperative.