While searching for people to interview for my next edition of the Anti-Hustle, I reconnected with my college friend, Bianca Duec. Bianca and I lived together during my senior year. She reached out to me because last year, she went down an unusual rabbit hole. This strange path led her to her spend hundreds of dollars on an ant colony.
A note: This edition includes a recording of our conversation. I’m playing around with including audio in the future in the hopes of making it more accessible and enjoyable. Let me know your thoughts! You can listen here:
“In true millennial style, we bought a house with our friends,” said Bianca. She and her partner Eric live in the upstairs apartment of a building in Queens and their friends, a couple, live in the first-floor apartment. Their friends have a baby, Endrik, who is now three years old and is also Bianca’s godson. Last May, they were all eating pizza together at a restaurant in Brooklyn. Bianca remembers a colony of ants climbing up the brick wall. Endrik was obsessed with the ants. He couldn’t stop watching them. In that moment, Bianca decided she needed to buy him an ant farm.
“That's exactly what we're gonna do, because I'm the aunt with the disposable income, the childless aunt, and I get him what he wants,” she said laughing.
Bianca is a global history teacher. She currently teaches 10th grade. Around the time, she decided to buy an ant farm, she was on spring break and was about to head back to school. There’s this feeling that settles in before breaks, she says, especially during spring break because it’s right before the summer break. It’s a weird anxious feeling like you’re out of control. She attributes this to her decision to buy the ant colony.
Soon after, Bianca began digging into ant farm research. She discovered that the ant farms most popular in the 1990s and early 2000s were basically ant death traps.
I remember them all too well. They were thin vertically framed pieces of plastic with sand inside that was clear on both sides so you could see the ants burrowing. Bianca had already purchased one of these ant farms. It came with a code that promised 20 free ants if you signed up on their website. However, she learned that it wouldn’t come with a queen ant, which meant that the entire colony would only live for a few months.
“Obviously I would want to get one with a queen because that’s so terrible, to just watch them die in a rectangle. I don't care how educational it is, that sounds so bad!”
Once Bianca found out the truth about these types of farms, she started searching for how to buy an ant colony with a queen. It turned out that it was hard to find people selling them online. The reason was that if you purchased a non-native ant colony and the ants escaped or you let them go, it could cause a serious environmental impact. Bianca had to do some real digging to find a certified ant dealer.
Seven hours in, she found herself in a tunnel of ant information on the website, Ants Canada. She started searching for ant dealers certified for the New York area. At this point, she started thinking that she might have gone too far. But she found a contact and emailed him. He was a college student in California. He wrote back and asked to schedule a call with her.
An hour and a half later on the phone, Bianca had learned all of the ins and outs of the reproductive cycles and stages of ant growth. She took a lot of notes on her phone. Once the ant dealer gave her the prices, she felt like she might have been in over her head. It was the last day of break before she went back to school. But, because of that anxious feeling, she impulsively bought the colony.
Her ant dealer had two options. Bianca could buy a gravid queen. This type of ant would be about to have her first set of workers and would cost $100. He also offered a queen who already had her first generation of workers. This type of colony would cost $170. On top of that, Bianca would need to purchase a terrarium, a five-inch long clear plastic box (known as the outworld) that included a covered base, which held the underworld. The terrarium was $125, made with special glue and cement, and promised to hold up to 300 ants. Bianca decided on the second option.
She wound up getting a species called Camponotus, a New York carpenter ant. If they were released or escaped they wouldn’t be causing any damage, avoiding any damage like the current issue with the spotted lanternfly.
When Bianca’s arrived in the mail, they came in a test tube that had a piece of cotton with water at one end and another piece plugging up the other end. Inside was a queen and two worker ants, along with a supply of food.
Through her research, Bianca learned that queen ants are the only ones to mate and they only do it once. In fact, queen ants store sperm in a special pouch. It’s only when she opens the pouch does the sperm fertilize her eggs.
While worker ants are female, all male ants are drones. Their entire purpose is to mate, then dies quickly afterward. When a larva is fed royal jelly (instead of honey and pollen), that ant will become a queen ant and eventually mate. When the queen is ready to mate, she grows wings and looks for a mate. So, if you see an ant with wings, it’s likely a queen. After she mates, she tears off her wings and becomes a gravid queen. She will then have babies for the rest of her life.
Bianca thought about that existence for a while. She imagines how terrible it might be. “Can you imagine, you make a mistake and then for the rest of your life you're having children?”
As soon as she received the test tube, Bianca started texting her ant dealer with questions. She remembers feeling like someone who was buying cocaine for the first time, asking him what she should do. When her friends found out that she bought their son an art farm, they slightly questioned her sanity. Bianca’s husband Eric was unphased by the fact that she had spent around $300 on an ant farm. He told her that he had expected it to be closer to $1,000.
She felt bad leaving the ants in the tiny test tube, so she asked her how soon she should transfer them. Her ant dealer told her that she could move them any time she wanted. So she transferred them right away.
Bianca also learned that on average a queen ant can live for 10-15 years, sometimes longer. “I had these grand fantasies that I'm going to get this ant farm and Endrik is going to learn to feed them and grow up with these pet ants and then eventually we'll put them in his room.”
Unfortunately, the ants immediately started behaving abnormally. They weren’t going into the outworld section. Bianca went into a negative spiral and became upset at the thought that she might quickly kill them. Eventually, she found a page on Reddit entirely devoted to ant-keeping (for those not in the know, these pages are called subreddits). She learned that the ants should have remained in the tube for another month until there were 20 more worker ants. Too much space stresses them out. Her ant dealer had inadvertently misinformed her.
Her colony was stressed but eventually did move into the correct area. But, because there was so much space, they weren’t moving their waste. Normally ants are very clean and move their waste into the outworld. Instead, they were piling it on top of their water reservoir, which was causing mold to grow. Four months later, the colony hadn’t expanded, when there should have been about 50. Bianca had five. Even though they were simple little ants, she had grown attached to them. She didn’t want them to die. She looked up safe ways to let them go free, then she and her godson released them together in their backyard.
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