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Honey or honey pot ants is a common name of a number of unrelated species with similar habits.
Any idea what the yellow grape-like objects are hanging from the nest?
The honey ants are the camels of the ant family. They live in dry areas throughout the world, but particularly the deserts of Australia, where food and water may be scarce for long periods of time. To cope, honey ants have unique storage tanks for holding liquids. These storage tanks are special worker ants called repletes.
When times are good and food is abundant, the repletes drink the extra liquid food and swell up like balloons. Then they hang around, literally, from the ceiling of the nest, until times are tough. If the colony runs out of food, the other workers entice the repletes to spit up their reserves to share with the others. Having repletes is kind of like having liquid food in the bank.
Because of their name, honey ants are sometimes mistakenly thought to feed on sweets, but the repletes may also store fluid from animal prey. Dr. Bill Brown used to tell a story about how he and some other scientists were digging up a nest of honey pot ants. Having heard that people in the southwestern United States and Australia eat the swollen repletes filled with honeydew, the other scientists decided to taste a few. Dr. Brown declined however, because he had noticed nearby foraging ants were gathering fluids from dead earthworms.
Researchers recently discovered a way to control cane toads, an introduced pest, in Australia: put out cat food for the meat ants, Iridomyrmex reburrus.
Sound a bit far fetched? It turns out that when scientists scattered cat food along the banks of cane toad-infested ponds, the meat ants would come to the shore to pick it up. If they encounter young cane toads emerging from the water while foraging there, the meat ants attack. In fact, in the study area 98% of emerging toads were laid into by ants within two minutes of leaving the water.
You might wonder if desirable species of toads meet the same fate. It turns out that other kinds of toads evade meat ants at all costs. Only the cane toads freeze in position long enough to for the meat ants to overwhelm them with their tough jaws.
What’s so bad about cane toads? The cane toads were introduced into Australia in an effort to control another pest in sugar cane (thus the name). Soon is became evident that when carnivorous vertebrates – marsupials, lizards, snakes or crocodiles- tried to eat a cane toad, they would succumb to its toxins. With so many cane toads, the threat to wildlife is a very real one.
Is the idea of using ants to control pests a new one? No, certain ants have been used by humans to control pests for centuries. As far as is known, the ancient Chinese were the first to use ants to protect crops. As long as 1,700 years ago, farmers employed weaver ants to keep caterpillars, stink bugs and small rodents out of their valuable citrus orchards. Today weaver ants are used to control citrus pests in Northern Australia.
The colors of this meat ant specimen photographed by April Nobile (Copyright AntWeb.org, 2000-2009. Licensing: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Creative Commons License, downloaded from Wikimedia) have faded somewhat. Check out the gorgeous iridescent gaster of photographs of Iridomyrmex reburrus at Myrmecos.net.
Now, I wonder if sprinkling cat food about will keep cats from sitting on my keyboard. 
Reference:
Georgia Ward-Fear, Gregory P. Brown and Richard Shine. (2010). Using a native predator (the meat ant, Iridomyrmex reburrus) to reduce the abundance of an invasive species (the cane toad, Bufo marinus) in tropical Australia
Journal of Applied Ecology, early view at journal website.
Despite the rain, the ASU Social Insect Expo held at the Desert Botanical Garden was the place to be last night. The room was packed with people of all ages interested in learning more about ants, honey bees and other insects.
The exhibits included some metallic casts of ant nests. This is a fire ant mound. The casts are produced by pouring liquid aluminum or zinc into actual nests, and then after the metal hardens, digging them out. My husband and I think these would make great sculptures.
Live colonies of numerous species of ants were on display. Although I had no control over the lighting and shot through Plexiglas in some cases, I was able to get some okay photographs. These are two castes of the big-headed ant, Pheidole rhea. I’ll be using some of the others (honey pot ants, leafcutters, and acorn ants) in upcoming posts.
Along with a honey bee demo hive, were exhibits of worker honey bees trained using Pavlov’s conditioning techniques.
Something I hadn’t seen before were videos of live insects under Synchrotron x-ray imaging. Very cool tool!
Overall, it was a lot of fun and good information. Given the obvious success of this event, hopefully there will be more Social Insect Expos in the future.
See more about the x-ray imaging at:
Argonne, University scientists reveal insect respiratory function with X-rays
Mark W. Westneat, Oliver Betz, Richard W. Blob, Kamel Fezzaa, W. James Cooper, Wah-Keat Lee. Tracheal Respiration in Insects Visualized with Synchrotron X-ray Imaging. Science 24 January 2003: Vol. 299. no. 5606, pp. 558 – 560.
Mark W. Westneat, John J. Socha, and Wah-Keat Lee. (2008). Advances in Biological Structure, Function, and Physiology Using Synchrotron X-Ray Imaging. Annual Review of Physiology. Vol. 70: 119-142.
When I am acting as the “Consult-Ant” and answering questions about ant farms, people are generally interested in finding out more about ant queens.
When an ant colony is ready to branch out, the current queen lays eggs that develop into males or new queens instead of workers. Adult male ants are winged, and have small heads and slender bodies. They can easily be mistaken for wasps.
Newly emerged queens are larger than both males and workers, and have four wings.
When conditions are just right, such as after a summer thundershower, the males and new queens fly from the nest. The whole colony is in a tizzy when this happens. Worker ants gush from the nest entrance and mill around. Winged males and queens climb up on grass stalks, trees, or anything tall in the area.
In many species, the winged queens and males fly to meet with males and queens of the same species of ant from other nests. They enter what is called a mating swarm, a swirling cloud of flying and mating insects.
After mating, the males drop to the ground and soon die. The new queens, the ones that escape being eaten that is, also drop to the ground. The queens quickly pull off their wings by rubbing them between the back of their body and their hind legs, twisting and tugging. Once the wings are off, they quickly hide themselves. Ground-nesting ant queens tunnel into the soil while other types of queens may slip into cracks in the bark of logs or creep under nearby rocks. There a queen makes a safe chamber to start her new colony.
You can tell she’s a queen because of the scars on her trunk (middle section) where her wings were.
The queen will lay eggs that develop into tiny worker ants, and a new colony is born.
Have you ever seen swarming ants?
The theme today for Life Photo Meme at Adventures of a Free Range Urban Primate blog is “reproduction.”
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