Army
Carpenter Ants
Acquired: Other
Gender: N/A
Cool to watch, but not my kind of pet
Both as a child and as an adult, I've done the ant farm thing on five separate occasions. I have used the traditional Uncle Milton variety of ant farm twice and the gel type of ant farm three times. I think the gel kind of ant farm is best because it's both the food and the habitat for the ants, so once you put the ants in there, you never open the lid again. Plus, the burrows and tunnels look cooler in the gel.
On the positive side, it's really cool watching the ants build tunnels and burrows. It's like moving art.
But negatives really outweighed the positives for me. They didn't live for very long, regardless if then ants were mail ordered or collected from the sidewalk. I was told once that the ants don't live for very long without a queen telling them what to do, so maybe that was part of the problem. Also, I just found them to be too creepy for my liking. I've had to deal with and infestations in my house before, and that has completely turned me off the idea of any farms. In my experience, ant farms are better in idea than practice.
