Honey Pot Ant By: Charlie Rosenthal Myrmecocystus ants, also known as honey pot ants, live in warm, dry areas. They are most commonly found at the edges of deserts in Africa, Australia, and North America. So, it isn’t naturally found in San Diego, but they are in some zoos. Their bodies are dark red, but their abdomen, the part that stores fluids such as honey, nectar, or other plant fluids, can become the color of the liquid inside. They can grow to be ¼-½ inches in length, but their abdomens can be the size of a small grape. Like previously mentioned, honey pot ants live in the desert ecosystem. An abiotic factor of the desert ecosystem is the sun, and a biotic factor is the honey pot ant. The honey pot ant helps it’s ecosystem because it removes excess plant fluids. It has no negative effect on the environment. Honey pot ants get its food from plants. They also eat small insects. The honey pot ant eats plant fluids that are very high in sugar cantaloupe, and occasionally the secretions from dead animals. There are not any foods toxic to the honey pot ant. I could not find the colony size for the honey pot ant, but I do know that the queen ant can produce up to 1,500 ants per day. There is the queen ant, the worker ants, and the repletes. Of course the queens produce the ants. The workers scavenge for food, and during the winter, the repletes are fed all the food that the workers gather so that they can feed the colony when there isn’t any food left. I also could not find if there was any difference between male and female ants. Honey pot ants are very territorial, and will attack other honey pot ant colonies, kill their queen, then enslave their workers.
Honey Pot Ant By Owen Hall Myrmecocystus Mexicanus
The honey pot ant is a very interesting type of ant. When most people think of them, they think of the large bloated gasters filled with some sticky honey like liquid. These ants are known as Repletes. There are also repletes that hold other valuable resources like water and body fat. The repletes act like living refrigerators that keep food fresh. Not all honey pot ants are repletes though, most of them are workers who bring the repletes food to store. These ants live in the desert, where there is sometimes a lack of food and water which is why they have these big ant refrigerators. These ants diets tend to be mostly nectar of flowers and other sweet liquids. The workers are just average workers. In the wild, you might mistake them for a normal sidewalk ant. The queen does not replete like some of the other ants in the colony. Her abdomen is filled with eggs. In some regions, the honey pot ant is food and maybe even considered a delicacy. There sweet abdomens taste like candy. People roast them or just eat them raw. They are sought after by ant keepers because of the huge bloated repletes. They can even add color to there food to turn them whatever color they want. The honey pot ant is one of my favorite ants. They are very interesting not just because of repletes but because of their smart workers that always seem to know their way around.