Family Daze
Raising the stock is no easy feat for the supervisors of an ant farm
By Debbie Farmer
Hard as this may be to believe, I've intentionally become the owner of ants. Fifty of them. Give or take a few. Now some of you may be wondering what I'm doing with all these insects, but those of you with children will instantly suspect that a birthday gift from a well-meaning childless relative is behind all this. And you're right.
I mean, if anyone had tried telling me that one day, I'd pay good money to watch a bunch of ants, the very same type that I see everyday in my kitchen for free, build tunnels in a plastic terrarium, I'd think they've been varnishing wood furniture without the windows open again. But stranger things have been done in the name of science. Or so they say. And certainly giving my children a hands-on educational experience is a worthy goal.
That said, the first lesson we learned about keeping an ant farm is that you just can't round up a few strays from underneath the kitchen sink and herd them all into the container and call it science. Oh nooooo. You need special ants that you must order through the mail from a P.O. box in New Jersey.
So, while we all waited for these ants to arrive, we busied ourselves preparing the terrarium. Needless to say, we tried to make it as natural and ant-like as possible. We added the sand and several decorative accessories that came in the box, like, for example, several miniature plastic shops, a couple of trees, two tiny plastic sports cars and something that looked like a miniature gazebo with an adjustable swing, although I'm not completely sure about this.
"What are they going to do in there?" my husband asked. "Date?"
"Don't get smart," I said.
When the ants finally arrived, my children eagerly placed them in their new home. OK, perhaps "placed" is too mild a word. Rather we forced them in through the tiny hole in the top of the terrarium by flinging them off the top of a pencil.
"They don't look so good," my son said.
"I bet they're hungry," my daughter offered.
Of course this brought up a whole new set of problems. You see, according to the official care instructions, instead of eating the usual things like potato chips and stale breadcrumbs, these ants preferred the Bhatkar diet.
For those of you lucky enough not to know what this is, it's a special ant food formula named after, you guessed it, Awinash Bhatkar, who, I suspect, had way too much time on his hands.
Anyway, according to the recipe, all we had to do was create a mixture of one egg, 62 ml honey, 1 gm vitamins, 1 gm minerals, 5 gm agar salts and 500 ml water. Then once we figured out what, exactly, agar salt was, we had to dissolve it in 250 ml boiling water. Next we mixed the water, honey, vitamins, minerals and the egg until smooth. After that we added the agar, stirred constantly and poured into petri dishes (0.5-1 cm deep) and stored in the refrigerator.
Let me just say, I have soufflé recipes that are easier to prepare.
Despite all of the hard work, however, I must admit we did learn a thing or two about ants. For instance we learned that 1) the expensive ones you mail order from New Jersey look suspiciously similar to the free California ones in my kitchen; 2) most of them would rather live just about anywhere than inside a terrarium, no matter how good the shopping is; and 3) ants are way too short to push themselves on a swing.
Oh, yeah. I learned one more thing: If you leave the lid off the container, the ants will eventually escape and thrive on their own by eating the cookie crumbs underneath the refrigerator.
You know, sometimes it's a funny thing how science works.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
