Elton Publications: Ants

Like bees, termites and wasps, ants live in large groups. They are social insects.

Some ants in the colony have special jobs. The queen ant has one main job. She has to lay enough eggs to keep the colony alive. A few male ants live in the colony and their job is to mate with the queen to make the eggs. Most of the ants that we see are female ants. They are worker ants and it is their job to collect the food, help the baby ants and to fight enemies.

Ants are incredibly strong. They can lift things that are about twenty times heavier than they are. How much do you weigh? If you had the strength of an ant, how much could you lift? This could be a world record!

If you were looking for an ant, you could look in most lands of our planet. They live everywhere, except in very cold places. Some ants build nests in trees and others build nests under the ground. Their nests can be easily seen because the ants build a mound that looks like a small volcano. In other places, ants build a nest that looks like a small mound of dry twigs. If the mound is disturbed, thousands of angry little ants can be seen.

The queen ant lays very small eggs. After just a few days, the egg hatches. The young larva looks like a tiny worm. A few weeks later, the larva becomes a pupa. It moves very little in its cocoon. It grows and changes in the cocoon, but it does not eat or drink. After about twenty five days, an adult ant comes out of the cocoon. A worker ant can live a couple of years while a queen ant can live for more than a decade. Male ants might live for only a month or two.

In central Australia, honey ants can be found. The worker ants collect honey and pollen from plants. Where could they store their honey? They use some special ants in their nest. They feed the honey to these ants and the honey is stored in their body. These ants become very big and round. Aboriginal people liked to dig these honey ants out of their nests and bite off the swollen body that is filled with sweet honey.