Fun Facts About Ants

There are some interesting facts about ants that may help you to see them in a different light. Ants often get a bad rap, usually because they can be annoying and show up in your home when you least expect it. Here are some fun facts about ants.

• There are 35,000 types of ants in the world.
• The study of ants is called Myrmecology.
• Ants have six legs, each with three joints. Ants also have the largest brain of any insect. 
• Ants are very fast and strong for their size. Ants can lift twenty times their own body weight and if they were human, they would be able to run as fast as a racehorse.
• Most ants only live for 45 to 60 days, but queens live much longer, sometimes up to twenty years. Wood ant workers can live up to ten years.
• Ants smell and feel with their antennae. An ant's sense of smell rivals that of a dog.
• Ants don't chew food the way other insects do. They suck the juice from food and leave what is left over.
• Ants have two stomachs; one is for themselves and the other is to store food for other ants.
• There may be more than one queen per colony. If there is just one queen ant and she dies, the whole colony dies because there are no new ants born. The queen lays the eggs, while the worker ants, who are sterile, watch them. The worker ants also collect the food.
• Worker ants move eggs day and night, closer and further from the entrance to their nest, to keep them warm.
• Each ant colony has a distinctive smell which helps alert them to intruders.
• There is a type of ant known as the slave-maker. This ants steals the pupae of other ant colonies and uses them as their slaves.
• Army ants don't settle down; they are constantly moving.
• There are one million times as many ants as humans in the world.