We ordered the harvester ants online from a place in Utah (we're in Pennsylvania), and they arrived in the mail yesterday. They were shipped in a miniature plastic test tube inside a padded envelope. The ant information said that the shipping might take a while because they couldn't handle extreme temperatures (the ants, not the shippers). The day they arrived, it was in the 20's here, and had been in the teens the nights before, so I don't guess they were too concerned abou the extremes. All of the ants, miraculously, arrived alive.
We started out by poking 4 starter holes in the blue gel, which you can see in the picture to the left. Oh yeah...the farm has blue LEDs which allow it to double as a night light. The spotlight effect created by the gel is spiffy, too.
Next up was adding the ants. Here's an overhead view of them shortly after their introduction to the new environment.
And here's what they look like up close. They're red. The instructions also say not to touch them...they bite. Their mandibles are big enough to be seen by the naked eye, so I'd guess they could give you quite a jolt. Fortunately, nobody was bitten in the transfer process.
Here's a shot of one of the first intrepid tunnellers heading into one of the holes. They would crawl down, dig out a piece of gel, and then crawl back out to the surface and set it somewhere, starting little piles. In the gel, from the right angle, you can see their jaws cutting.
Here's one more shot of them crawling around. You can see the little piles of gel chunks. This was about 3 hours in, and they had just gotten dug down to the bottom of the initial holes we made. The initial holes were about 1/2 to 1 inch deep. They dug into three of the four of them. I have no idea why they left the fourth one alone.
I'll try to remember to put something in one of the pictures so you can see the scale of what's going on here.
