Harvester Ants & Ant Food

Making your ants inactive:

            This is done by putting your ants in the refrigerator (not freezer).  It may take up to 15 minutes.  If taking them out, they are still moving, you can put them back in the fridge longer.  What is longer, until they are not moving anymore.  You literally could leave your ants all day in the refrigerator, but you will not want to do that as it could then take 2 hours or more for them to come back to life.  Most children will not want to wait that long.

Once your ants are not moving: Open the lid on the container and with a funnel tap causing your ants to fall into the farm.  However, do not transfer anything other than the ants.  Everything else is for keeping the ants happy during transit.

Again, only ANTS are what you want to transfer into the farm.

What to do if you want your ants to stay in this transit container for a few extra days?

Set the container in your refrigerator.  You can leave it in there for 3 days.  Take it out and add a small piece of apple.  Allow the ants to warm up slowly in normal room temperature.  After 24 hours, if you need to, you can set the container of ants in the refrigerator another 3 days.  After this set up in farm.

Your farm should have information for feeding, please follow.  We have also included ant chow and here are the directions for the ant food.

To feed your ants, pre-soak about a teaspoon of ant chow in a small amount of water overnight. Remove the water and add a couple of drops of honey and mix.  Drop a couple of seeds in your farm for your ants every other day.  Store the unused soaked ant chow in the refrigerator.   These directions for adding ant chow, of course, are not for gel farms.  We suggest you always check the directions for your specific farm.