ANTS!

When we took the kids to the Science Center last fall, we chose an ant farm as a souvenir from the trip.  The ant farm came with just the green farm frame and the sand that the ants dig around in...but no ants.  Instead of buying an already populated farm, one just sends in an accompanying postcard to the company and they send the ants through the mail when you're ready for them.  Well, due to my procrastinating nature, I didn't get the postcard sent in in time for the company to send the ants before the weather got too cold (a frozen ant doesn't do anyone any good!).  Due to the week of warmer weather last week, the company sent an email letting us know they were able to send the ants.  So we checked the mailbox everyday just as soon as they mailman had passed.  And boy! did we have an excited kiddo when the ants finally arrived after waiting FOREVER (according to a four year old anyway!).



Leftover potato casserole, a little ham, milk, eggs (fresh farm brown eggs that is - $1.50/dozen and plenty of them come April if anyone is interested), and....ants.  ANTS?!?!  Yeppers.  We were suppose to put the ants in the fridge for fifteen minutes to "calm them down" before dumping them into the ant farm.   Cool, huh? (HA!)  :-)

 

And the ants in their travel tube before dumping them out.  You can't see the ants, but you can see how they traveled.  Caleb doesn't look very excited in this picture...after waiting fifteen minutes for the ants to chill out (HA!),  he didn't really care for any pictures to be taken.



I put the camera away during the actual dumping of the ants. (Mama only has two hands and they both were concentrating on making sure the ants made their homes in the ant farm and not my living room!)  But once they were dumped, we were able to watch.  It was pretty neat to see them running around, already moving sand around. 



The camera was pretty tempermental so we didn't get any great pictures of the actual ants, but you can make out a few.  The ones in the upper section had yet to find the little hole that allowed them to drop down to the sand. 

 

See the two ants in the middle of the picture, kind of going down into a little cavity of sand?  They are after the teeniest little piece of apple that we fed them.  I'll refrain from telling you all the facts that we learned about ants from the little booklet they sent along, but I will say that a pinhead size of apple will last the 24-30 ants a whole week!