You wake up one morning and find a skinny tail of ants across your kitchen counter, or maybe it’s time to throw the football around in the backyard and you discover a fire ant infestation. Ants are difficult to kill, it seems like no matter how much you throw at them, the colony always comes back. Fire ants can be a hazard — their painful bites are a real nuisance and the types of ants that end up in your kitchen are an even bigger headache

• Ants appear in shades of green, red, brown, yellow, blue or purple. • An ant has two stomachs, in one stomach it stores food for itself and in • Adult ants are unable to swallow solid food. They depend on the juice • An ant is able to lift about 20 times its own body weight. they are able to squeeze out from pieces of food. • An ant uses its antenna for touch as well as smell. • These gardens are looked after and harvested for food. • There is at least one queen in each ant colony. • the other it stores food that is to be shared with other ants. • Some ants are able to sleep seven hours a day. • Ants are mostly omnivorous, that is, they eat other insects, seeds, oils and bread. • Queen ants are provided with wings at birth, they lose these wings after they fly to New colonies. • Black ants and Wood ants do not have a sting; instead they are able to squirt a spray of formic acid. Ants normally range from 2 to 7 mm in length. The carpenter ant is an exception to the rule, as it can stretch to 2 cm, or even an inch. • An ant has the largest brain amongst insects. It is said that the processing power in an ant’s brain and a Macintosh II computer might be similar. • The Army Ant (Citron Burchell) of South America can have as many as 700,000 members in its colony. The Leaf Cutter Ants are farmers. • hey cut out pieces of leaves which they take back to their nests. They chew them into a pulp and a special fungus grows it. • Ants cannot digest leaves because they cannot digest cellulose. • A Tropical Leafcutter ant uses its sharp outer jaw to cut leaves and make them into pulp. The pulp is later used to make fungus gardens. • Worker ants are given the responsibility of taking the rubbish from the nest and putting it into the rubbish dump. When a worker ant finds a source of food, it leaves trail of scent to attract other ants in the colony to it. • The Slave-Maker ant (Polymeric Refastens) is so named because it raids the nest of ants and steals their pupae. Once the pupae hatch, they are made to work as slaves within the colony. • Over 10000 known species of ants exist in the world. • The average life span of an ant is 45 to 60 days. The ant has very strong legs which help it to run very quickly.