You can always change this.

Ants are amazing. Did you know that an ant can lift up to twenty times the weight of its body? How inspiring!
AntWorks is a “NASA experiment” type of product that contains a nutritious gel in which ants can live, build their tunnels, or even breed their colony!

I got one AntWorks habitat in March, when no ants were yet available. But now the time has come, and I yesterday went on hunting for my first bunch of ants. There is a path in our garden that ants use frequently, so it was not a miracle I could easily pick about 30 of the antkind. I carefully put them into a glass jar and closed the lid.

To avoid any harm to ‘my’ ants, I gave them some sugar, hoping they can then better bear the conditions of the restricted environment. It was too late I realized that ants moisturized some of the sugar, and so their limbs stuck on the walls of the glass. Yes, ant is a strong pest that lifts up to 20 times its weight, but not so strong that it could dismember its limbs. Some of my ants (about 6) stopped moving; even after I intensely shook the jar, they appeared to be glued to the walls. They might have been sleeping, but in retrospection I guess they bravely passed out in the sugar emulsion. Still many were left alive at that time, and at the same time, I had no idea of doing any harm!

To even improve their well-being, before we (me and my ants!) went to sleep, I carefully poured few drops of water, in case any dehydration might have occurred during the night. It turned out, in the morning, that this was the last Sacrament for most of the ants. They either drown in the sugar bath, or they stuck on the walls, or some other, to me unknown incident has happened.

So, in the coming days, I am about to hunt for more ants but avoiding any sugar and water. To be continued..

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 12:41 pm and is filed under ants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.