Our Ant Study - COMPLETED

As part of our biology unit we will be studying ants and will chronicle their adventure here!

I decided on purchasing an Ant Hill from Insect Lore through Amazon. I choose this particular model because it had great ratings and I really liked the idea of the three dimensional design allowing you to see what the ants are doing in and out of the hill in a much more realistic fashion. We ordered the ants from Ants Alive and since it said we had 7-10 days until they would arrive we waited until the following Monday to prep our ant hill following the directions exactly. I also went to the library and picked up a few book for the kids to peruse: Ants (Nature's Children), An Ant Colony (Nature Watch), and Ant Cities (First Sight).

The day the ants arrived KM and I were very excited and took all necessary precautions to get them into their ant hill safely - for us and them, as these are harvester ants and they can STING!!! We did manage to get them in and ready to go. Here I will be posting various links, photos and videos from our study as well as KM's Daily Observations. If you have any interesting links you would like to share PLEASE leave a comment and let us know!!!

OBSERVATIONS BY KM ----

2/8/12 - The ants arrived today and are currently clumping together and getting used to their new home. 

2/9/12 -  The ants have started tunneling on the right side of the hill.

2/10/12 - 

Up close

9:46 am

10:31 pm

2/11/12 - 

9:11 am

9:58 pm

2/12/12 - The ants have a little graveyard outside the hill. They have also constructed about 9 tunnels.

8:51am

8:59 pm

graveyard on backside of hill

2/13/12 -

8:11am 

8:03pm

2/14/12 - The ants are moving very slow and seem to only tunnel on the right side of the hill. It also looks like they have no motivation to work on tunnels. It appears as though only 2/3 are still alive.

8:31am

2/17/12 - They seem to have slowed down working quite a bit the past few days. Not sure what is going on.

2/19/12 - They are busying themselves again, but working more on the outre graveyard than tunneling.

3/2/12 - Haven't posted much of anything as they really are just doing the same old thing. There are only about 17 left now though and it is starting to feel a bit creepy and deserted.

3/15/12 - We released the last two ants today because they just seemed so sad. We learned a lot and it was a really interesting study.