It all started with two ideas. 1) I wanted one of those ant farms because I thought it would be cool to have "pet" ants that I envisioned I could play with like puppies and 2) My dad was doing yard work, found a huge anthill under the deck post we were removing, and wanted to exterminate it. This is the absolute perfect mindset combination for starting an ant farm. We ran into many problems while trying to start this ant farm and these ideas were just problem 1.
Problem 2 was that we didn't read the directions about how to start the ant farm. That was a crucial piece to the puzzle that my mom, dad, and I just picked up and threw out. We made up our own plan of action, and it started with my dad taking a shovel straight to the anthill and digging. Bad plan. The ants went crazy. They were crawling everywhere. It was pure chaos for the ants, and admittedly for us too.
Problem 3 was that we didn't know how to collect the ants or where to put them, and they were scrambling away from their destroyed home. My mom found a huge bucket that we started scooping the ants into, but then we realized that the ants were just crawling up the sides of the bucket and getting out. My mom then had the idea to put Vaseline on the rim of the bucket because it was supposed to prevent them from crawling out. This made everything worse. The ants were so frantic and desperate to escape that they were starting to trudge through the Vaseline. One by one, they would get stuck in it and slowly die from drowning in the thick Vaseline. It was like they would rather die via Vaseline asphyxiation than live in an ant farm.
For an 11 year old, this ant suicide was horrifying. I immediately regretted this ant farm. I changed my mind. I didn't want the ant farm anymore, but my parents were determined and my dad was getting rid of the anthill no matter what. Also, when my mom sets her mind on a project, she become very determined to see it through. It's a good trait to have generally.... except for when you're making your daughter an ant farm and killing all the ants in the process.
God knows how we managed to salvage ants after the mass ant suicide through Vaseline-bucket-rim, but we did. We had enough ants to start a farm according to our self made directions. It didn't matter that some ants were missing legs, other had partially crushed thoraxes, and some were so covered in Vaseline that the sand was sticking to them and they would probably die from suffocation eventually.
After all this, I thought the terror was over and I could finally enjoy my anthill, but then we realized we needed the queen. According to the internet, without the queen there will be no offspring, and the current ants would just roam endlessly with no purpose in life and the farm will eventually die.
Now I wish I could continue my story with another sub-story about how my parents and I dug through the remnants to find the queen, but alas we did not. We never found her. In all honesty, she probably died in the destruction of the hill, and needless to say, my ant farm did not make it. Actually, it barely made it a few hours. All of the ants were so badly mutilated from our failed attempt to capture them, that they all died within a few hours.
I feel kind of bad for hurting all those ants, but I was young and didn't know better.... and probably should have held onto the directions, or just mail ordered the ants. But, my family never tried to start an ant farm again, and I always wonder why....
