Hi guys, I'm really excited to announce, we've just launched our official ant keeping shop.
At antsaustralia.com.
Our mission?
To make ant keeping a highly accessible, and affordable hobby for everyone, whilst producing
the highest quality of products.
It’s been a long time in the making for us, here at Ants Australia, but after extensive
prototyping and testing, we’re really quite happy the results, and we think you’ll be
too.
So, what we’ve come up with is a range of ytong nests, which as you can see, come painted
in beautiful vibrant colours, including, blue, green, purple and red.
We also have six different sizes to choose from.
From our smallest model, perfect for raising a young colony, or a small species, or even
just a single queen – to our largest model, capable of housing massive colonies, thousands
of ants strong.
Plus, with our ‘custom order’ option, you’ll be able to request your own chamber
depth to perfectly match whichever species you intend on raising.
From the minute…to the monstrous.
There’s really something here to suit everyone’s ant needs!
So, let’s put some of our nests to use, shall we?
Here, we have a few young colonies of mine.
Some Sugar ants…and some Jumping Jacks…Currently, they’re housed in, what I like to call,
a “tubs and tubes” setup.
Which is comprised, simply of a test tube, acting as their nesting area, inside of a
container, acting as their foraging area, also known as an “outworld”.
We’ll be offering outworlds on our shop soon.
However, these are something very easily made on your own.
If you need some guidance, I’ve made a tutorial on how to set one up here…
So, once your outworld is ready, it’s just a matter of attaching up one of our nests
via the way of some vinyl tubing, a short segment of which comes provided with all our
nests.
All you’ll need to decide, is which size to go for.
Ants don't need a lot of space for nesting.
Often, if they have too much, they’ll dump their garbage in uninhabited parts of their
nest, instead of their outworld.
Given the humid conditions within the nesting area, this can quickly lead to harmful mold
growth.
So, you really need a nest which matches the size of your colony.
If anything, it’s better if your ants are cramped in a clean nest, then spacious in
a dirty one.
So in my case, for these two Sugar Ant colonies here, I’ve decided on a size 1, and for
the Jumping Jacks, a size 3.
To entice the ants to move in, what you’ll want to do, is first, hydrate the nest.
Positioned directly above the sponges are little holes for injecting water.
Something like a syringe is perfect for the job.
Initially, you’ll need to give it a good soak, as the ytong, will be bone dry.
Try to make it so half the nest is damp and half dry.
This creates a moisture gradient throughout the nest, allowing the ants to pick their
preferred levels of humidity.
To achieve this effect, it helps if you inject the water in slowly, allowing time for it
to absorb in and to prevent any runoff.
This is process is made a little easier with our larger nests, as they have two separate
hydration sections, one on either side.
So, simply hydrate one side, or the other.
It’s also a good idea to alternate between each side.
So the next time you hydrate, fill up the opposite side.
This will greatly reduce the chance of mold growth, as all parts of the nest will get
a chance to dry out.
Once the nest has been hydrated, keep it nice and dark by covering it up with something.
Now, it’s just a matter of waiting.
Sometimes the ants will discover the nest and move in almost straight away, and other
times, they may take days, even weeks.
As I often say, ant keeping requires a good deal of patience, and experimenting.
Some ants prefer a relatively dry nest, whereas, others, prefer a saturated one.
So, if they don’t seem interested at first, play around with the humidity.
Through trial and error, I’ve learned that these Sugar Ants here, prefer a dry nest.
So, I’ve only been adding in a little bit of water once every 4-5 days, and that seems
to keeps them happy.
Once they’ve moved in, you can now enjoy viewing their activity through our high clarity
acrylic.
The bright white colour of ytong also does a nice job at bouncing light, thus illuminating
the ants and allowing you to see an incredible amount of detail.
It’s very easy to lose hours staring away.
Even after they’ve moved, it’s a good idea to leave some sort of water reservoir,
like a test tube setup, within their outworld.
That way, they have a fresh source of water to drink from at all times.
If you’re going with one of our larger nests, with two entrance holes, our standard 13mm
tubing fits up perfectly with our 16mm test tubes.
So you can easily attach a test tube setup straight up to the nest, like so.
This not only gives the ants a place to drink from, but also ups the humidity within the
nest.
So, it’s especially useful if you’re going away for a week or two and won’t be around
to hydrate the nest manually.
So aside from the vibrant colours and sleek design, what makes our ytong nests so great
for raising ants?
Well, let’s run you through how we make them…
We start with the primary ingredient, the ytong.
Ytong is a strong, versatile, high performance building product made from Autoclaved Aerated
Concrete.
It’s been quite a popular medium within the ant keeping scene for some time now, but
it’s always had its drawbacks.
Firstly, its extreme evaporative nature results in the need to constantly hydrate, in order
to maintain optimal humidity levels.
Secondly, it often requires a bulky and heavy structure in order to maintain its strength
and to prevent cracking and splitting, making it hard to shape consistently and to post
affordably.
However, we’ve overcome all these problems and added significant improvements to the
use of this material.
So how do we do it?
Well, first we machine down the ytong blocks into 30mm slabs.
To these slabs, we then laminate a high quality marine grade plywood, using the world's strongest
and safest epoxy.
This epoxy then soaks up into the ytong, performing 2 main roles…
Firstly, it significantly strengthens the material, making it far more durable, and
so, can be easily machined further.
Additionally, making the final product much lighter and compact.
And secondly, it seals the entire base, essentially waterproofing the ytong.
Thus, limiting the rapid evaporative nature of the material and preventing ingress of
liquids from external sources.
Once prepared into composite slabs, we then head on over to the CNC machines.
Here, the nest interior, hydration spaces and rebates for the lid, are precisely carved
out.
Rebating the lid is important to help seal up the nest from escapees, and overall, ensures
it’s a safer product to handle, no sharp edges.
Once fully machined, using our state of the art equipment, the nests are then individually
hand finished and checked for defects.
Although, this does consume a fair bit of time per unit, we believe it is important
to give each nest a practical and durable finish.
After the final hand finishing, the sealing, and painting happens.
The nests receive 2 coats of a durable nontoxic paint finish, which is based on recycled sugarcane.
This specialised paint coating is done in such a way that only 90% of the Ytong is sealed,
so the nests can still breath, as they would naturally.
So with this paint, in conjunction with the plywood base, and absorbed in epoxy, we’ve
achieved optimum evaporation rates.
Making it easy to regulate the humidity levels and emulate the natural nesting conditions
of your ants.
Finally, after the paint have had a couple of days to fully cure.
Antibacterial sponges are installed, and our acrylic lids fitted.
The lids are made of a high clarity 4mm acrylic.
Holes are drilled in for hydration, and for the four small screws, which securely fix
the lids in place.
Using screws over glue, means that once the colony moves out, the lids can be easily removed
and the nests can be cleaned and reused.
As ytong can be quite brittle at times, you’ll just need to be a little gentle when screwing
the lids back on, they don’t need to be in super tight.
So as you can tell, each aspect of our design has been carefully considered and developed
with both the occupants, and you, as the caretakers in mind.
Striking the perfect balance between aesthetics and practicality.
Here at Ants Australia, we really love contributing to the unique and fascinating hobby, that
is “ant keeping”.
Now, we’re pleased to able to do this, not only by creating helpful and insightful videos
here on YouTube, but additionally, with our high-end ant keeping shop.
For those crafty people out there, don’t worry, we’ll still be continuing on with
our “How to Build an Ant Nest” series.
Working with ytong next, followed by naturalistic dirt setups.
Also, very keen to continue on with our ant documentary series, which you guys really
seem to enjoy.
As of posting this video, I’ll be heading over to the other side of the globe, over
in North America.
So perhaps I feature some native ants there.
I was thinking of possibly covering the genus “Formica” commonly known as wood or mound
ants.
They’re quite common over there, unseen here in Australia.
But I’m open to suggestions, so leave a comment below and let me know what you’d
like to see.
As always, thanks for watching this video and I hope you enjoyed.