Making an Ant Farm

When I was younger I used to want to have my own ant farm.  I thought ants were amazing little creatures and enjoyed watching them work.  Recently, one of the boys discovered several ant nests under rocks in the flower garden and was excited.  I thought it would be fun to capture some of the ants and teach the children a few things about them. Here is what we did. 

We started with two large mouth mason jars. In order to use less dirt and encourage the ants to make their tunnels closer to the outside where they would be more visible, we put a filler in the middle. You can use a empty paper towel tube, or whatever will fit in the middle of the jar. 

The boys had fun turning over rocks looking for ants. 

After searching a bit, we found enough ants with larva to dig up and add to our jar.

The two jars after being filled with dirt and ants. I only put them in the sunshine to get this picture. It's a good idea to place them in a cool dark place. 

After about 12 hours the ants had made lots of progress and dug many visible tunnels. As much as I tried, I could not get a clear picture.  It was lots of fun watching the ants work!  We kept them for around a week and a half and then let them go outside again. I wasn't sure what species of ants we had captured, so I didn't know what exactly to feed them. The bread, honey and veggies we gave them seemed to remain untouched, so I'm assuming they ate something else. 

It's interesting to me that ants are called "exceedingly wise" in God's Word! They are worth learning about, and "considering" as the Bible also says. :)