Ant farm – how to make a corner with unusual pets with your own hands?

Cats, dogs and hamsters are great, but many people have such pets. What if you want something unusual, interesting and not too expensive? You can make yourself or your child a wonderful gift – an ant farm. The originality of this gift lies, first of all, in the fact that it is quite easy to make it with your own hands.

Preparatory stage

To make an ant farm with your own hands, you need to do a little preparation. To start it is worth deciding on the capacity in which we will settle the restless family. An excellent ant farm is obtained from a flat aquarium, but this requires additional costs. Craftsmen can make a plexiglass container by bonding it with silicone glue. In this case, the design will turn out exactly the form that suits you the most.

The simplest version of an ant farm will be obtained from two containers for bulk products of different sizes. These can be jars or boxes made of transparent material without a pattern and damage, one of which fits freely inside the other. Both jars must have tight lids. You will populate the ant colony in the space between the two banksso that it is convenient to observe her life.

Soil or base for an anthill

The choice of filler for an ant farm depends on where you are going to get its inhabitants:

• If you plan to collect ants near the house, on the playground or in the nearest flower bed, then take the land there. Loosen it well, mix it with sand in a ratio of 2: 1 and fill your container.
• If you go to the forest or any other place that is far from home for insects, then take the land there and prepare the mixture according to the same recipe. Even in this case, you can use sand and soil from a flower shop. Such a mixture will contain peat and fertilizers that small inhabitants will like.
• If for your ant farm you decide to buy insects in a store or order via the Internet, then the kit will definitely contain a mixture suitable for their life.
• The container can be filled with a special gel. In this case, observing the life of the colony will be not only interesting, but also extremely simple. Insects do not have to be fed as this gel already contains the necessary nutrients. Another plus of such a filler is that it is not necessary to choose a flat container, in a transparent filler you can clearly see what your pets are doing.

Do not fill the container all the way to the top with the mud mixture. Leave a few centimeters of free space. And do not tamp the mixture, but just shake it slightly so that the inhabitants can easily make their own moves.

How to collect ants

The easiest way is to find ants in the yard. There is nothing complicated in this, especially if you connect a restless child to the process. Small anthills are very common, to find them, it is enough to follow where the small workers so purposefully drag their finds.

To collect an ant, take gloves, a scoop and a jar with a tight lid. In the lid, you can make several holes for air access with a thin needle., but they must be so small that insects cannot crawl out. You can drop honey or jam on the bottom, then the ants will gather around the sweets and will not try to get out. Carefully dig up a few anthill inhabitants and place them in a jar. Try to find the mother. It is much larger than the rest of the ants. 30 – 40 inhabitants are enough for your farm.

To populate a farm created with your own hands, you need to consider the following nuances:

• Only working insects can be collected on the surface of the anthill. They are unable to reproduce. To watch the ants lay their eggs and care for them, it is imperative to get the queen queen. Alas, but for this you have to dig an anthill deep enough.
• An ant farm inhabited only by worker ants will last no more than four weeks. This is their natural lifespan.
• Larger species of insects can be found in forest anthills than in urban sites. They are easier to look after.

How to care for an ant farm

It is not enough to make a house for an ant family. In order to observe how ants live for a long time, you need to properly care for the farm:

1. Once every few days, insects should be fed with pieces of fruit or drops of honey and jam. In order not to open the lid from above every time, you can make very small holes and drip honey and jam on them.
2. The mixture of soil and sand must be moistened from time to time. To do this, a piece of wet cotton wool is placed on the lid with holes and kept there for several days. You can’t water an ant farm!
3. Be sure to cover the truss with a dark cloth or cardboard box. For a normal active life, ants need darkness.
4. Your pets are fragile creatures, don’t forget that. The container must not be shaken or dropped.

Understand how making an ant farm yourself is not at all difficult. If you involved children in this process, then watching the little inhabitants will be even more interesting. The main thing is to act carefully so that the ants live where it is convenient for you, and not where they want.