 Have you ever wanted to start an ad colony? No? Oh. Oh. That's too bad then. This is awkward. But, assuming you do want to start an ad colony, because, you know, why I'd also be click a video with that in the title, I'll show you how to start an ad colony like this one. Oh, there's nothing in my hand. I mean, like this one, this is the wrong two. Like this one. Oh wait, that's a dead queen. I should not be showing this. This is like killing my credibility. Like this one. Oh, seriously, you do things. Like this one. Oh, this is poor. Like this one. Oh wait, this is Godzilla. What am I doing? Oh, I have to redo this whole clip now. Okay. I'll actually start an ad colony, just like this one. Nailed it. Okay. I'm going to start my guide on how to start your very own pet ad colony. Now, first of all, you're going to need a way to find a queen ad. You can find one yourself from a nup show flight. Now, depending on the species, nup show flights for queens happen at different times around the world. And basically, what nup show flight is is all the queens and the male ants fly, you know, on the colony into the sky and then they mate. And then all the males die and the queens take off their wings and run around. And during an nup show flight, you'll see, you know, swarms of ants on the ground, some of them will be bigger. And those are the queens. And then if you see one without any wings, it's usually safe to assume she's fertile and you can catch her. Now, for most species, the difference between a queen and a worker is huge. Like in this picture, you can see that the queen is visibly large in the both the male and the worker and that she has a very big thorax and an extended abdomen. Now, assuming you don't know much about, you know, insect anatomy, the thorax is the middle segment and the abdomen is the back segment. And in ants, the abdomen is often referred to as the gaster. So yeah, a lot of new vocabulary. However, in some species, it's a lot harder to distinguish. For example, one of the most common starter ants, mermaca. As you can see, the queen is very hard to tell apart from the workers because they're similar in size. For example, here's a difference between a mermaca queen and a mermaca worker. As you can see, the queen is bigger and if you look really close to the outline of two winged scars on her thorax and that's a tell tail way to distinguish a queen from a worker. If you can see the winged scars like on her middle section. Now if you can't find any queen ants during the summer nupchial flights and you live in Europe or any other country where it's legal to buy ants, well then there are a number of websites that will sell you queen ants. And I've actually put a link to where you can find a lot of these websites in the description. Now if you live in a country where it's legal to ship ants across the border, well that's simple. Just, you know, mark the package something else and don't tell the authorities. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Don't break the law. However, ants Canada does have a global ant-sneursary program so you can see if there are any ant breeders near you. I also put a link to that site in the description. Alright, now that you know how to get your queen ant, let's talk about housing. A test tube like this one can house ant colonies until they have around between 50 to 100 workers depending on the species. Now making a test tube setup is very easy. I already made it a video on telling you how to do this and I put the link in the description and in the annotation above. Alright, now go watch that video. I'll wait. Alright, are you done? Well, it doesn't matter because you can pause this video whenever you want, but let's keep going. Now when you first get your queen, you need to figure out if she's fully claustro, semi-clostro, or parasitic. So what do those words mean? Now fully claustro queens are like this queen here, my campanonous mo-dok queen. They have, usually have really big gasters and basically they store a lot of fat and other like nutrients inside of their gaster, so they don't eat any food at all until they have workers. So they feed their larva and their brood just by themselves with the stuff they have inside of them. Now a semi-clostro queen like this mermaca queen is a queen that doesn't store much fat in herself and must you know like forage for food. And with these queens you have to feed them, even like before they have workers. An example of a parasitic queen is this lacius umbratus queen. What these queens do in nature is they take over a different species colony by killing their queen and pretending to be the queen of the colony. These types of queens are hard to keep in captivity and are not recommended for total beginners. But if you do want to keep them, I'll link, I put a link in the description to a site about parasitic ants. You need to feed your ants both a sugar source and a protein source. Now for sugar I like to use honey or sugar water. For protein you can use dead insects or even a live insects if the colony has enough workers to bring it down. And what I usually do is every day I check in my cricket container for my lab rigat go and I see if there's any freshly dead crickets and I take those out and feed them to my colonies. Now to feed your colonies, if they're still in the tube, I usually use a barbecue scour to give them honey. Like I did it in the bowl of honey I use for my larger colony. So for these small colonies what I do is give them honey and then I also give them protein in the form of cricket legs for smaller colonies and not the entire cricket. Now this is because it's much easier for them to like move and eat smaller pieces of protein than for them to like eat consumed an entire cricket. If you want to ensure steady growth for your colony, make sure you remove all the un-eating pieces of food as well as all the garbage like once every couple of days. That way you'll limit the amount of mold growing in the tube. Now you know the less mold that's growing in the tube, the more likely the queen will produce a lot of brood and make a lot of workers and then your colony will grow bigger sooner. Once your colony has a decent number of workers, you need to move them into a form of carrier. Now for a carrier which are the professional term for ant farms, can be made by yourself or they can be purchased from a number of online retailers. Now if you're a beginner, I recommend that you buy your first or first one or two form of carrier online because they are like not that easy to make. However if you're really good at doing your self-projects and you know you have a lot of materials at home like grow or white-tongue etc. then you can try your hand at making your own and there are a number of guides available to help you on this. Important things for managing your colony and ensuring really quick growth is to always maintain one area of the form of carrier with really high humidity, like spray with water every one or two days and also to ensure that they all constantly have food. Overfeeding is obviously way better than underfeeding for ants. Another really important thing and this might seem like weird at first but remember that you shouldn't get a form of carrier that's too big. Ants actually like tight spaces and small chambers so if you get a huge form of carrier and they'll just use most of the chambers as garbage dumps and that'll cause a lot of problems later on. One of the worst problems is if you have mode growing inside of the form of carrier because it's most form of carrier that are sold these days like it's really hard to clean the interior. So you have to rely on the ants doing it themselves and if they don't have enough workers like they don't eat the space they're not going to clean it up and there'll be a lot of mode growing. Now another very common question is what species should I start with? And in my opinion there are a few species that make really good starter species and they are either lacyus or formica. Now these two genius of ants are very easy to care of. They grow fast and they can adapt easily to any situation so like if there's a mold, if suddenly there's light, if there's a lack of heat, they can adapt to it easily. Another great beginner species is Campanotus. Now these ants are also like pretty good beginner ants but they grow slower than lacyus and formica but like they're also really easy to care for and they get like major ants which are soldier ants and that's pretty cool. Alright everyone thanks for watching and hopefully with this guide you can start your very own pet ant colony. Now you might have noticed that I finally got an intro so yeah I got a friend from school to do it for me so big thanks to him and yeah bye!