Facts About Ants - Amazing Things About Ants You Probably Didn’t Know
Chris Stanley
Here are some facts about ants that you probably didn’t know.
• Ants have six legs (as do all insects). Each leg is composed of 3 joints. • Ants can actually lift 20 times their body weight.
• Worker ants live between 45 and 60 days. But here’s the facts about ants that might fascinate you - the Queen can live for up to 20 years!
• Ants use their antennae for both touch and smell.
• Ants have two compound eyes. These are eyes which are made up of smaller eyes.
• Another fact about ants is that they have two stomachs. One is for the ant’s personal use. The other is to share food with the community. (Thus, some ants live on the vomit of other ants, isn’t that a fact about ants you can pass along at dinner time?)
• In some ant species, when food is plentiful, young adults are fed as much food as possible. They become stuffed until they get big and fat and become living food-storage containers!
• The queen’s job is to lay eggs. The sterile worker ants look after her eggs by finding food, looking after the young, and defending the nest from unwanted visitors.
• Black and Wood Ants don’t sting, but they can squirt a spray of formic acid. This leads some birds to put ants in their feathers because the formic acid repels parasites.
• The worker ants move the eggs and larvae deep into the nest at night to protect them from the cold. In the morning, they move the eggs and larvae of the colony up to the top of the nest to get the warmth from the sun.
• The Army Ant of South America has the largest colony of any ants with as many as 700,000 ants in a single colony.
• The Leaf Cutter ants are actually farmers. They grow fungus on leaves and harvest it.
• Then there are the ants that "herd" aphids (small insects) and "milk" them with their antennas.
• Some species of ants breed their own army. While all worker ants will defend the colony, these are soldier ants. Ants use chemical warfare. They also fight to the death and even eat the larvae of conquered colonies!
• Here’s another interesting fact about ants: right this very minute, there are 10,000,000,000,000,000 ants living on earth!
• The best way to kill carpenter ants is a lot easier than you may think.
These are just a few of the fascinating facts about ants.
To learn more facts about ants go to the How Do I Get Rid of Ants website found at http://www.howdoigetridofants.com
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Posted under Pest Control
This post was written by admin on January 27, 2009
