Ant Farm Demolition

My son got an Ant Farm for Christmas, and we finally got around to setting it up this week. The instructions explained that you could either send away to receive the ants in the mail, or catch your own. We decided to catch our own as we had a bad experience ordering tadpoles in the mail (they arrived dead as doornails, and on the second try, one lived but he ended up being deformed). After all, how hard could it be to catch ants?

We followed the instructions and put a jar with water and brown sugar outside. I assumed we would be swarmed with ants within 24 hours. Um, wrong! We waited for days, through torrential rains and sunshine, still no ants.

Finally, my son resorted to crawling around with tweezers and catching a lowly three ants by hand. While he was on the ant safari, I setup the farm by adding the wet sand. We finally got the ants inserted, and eagerly waited for them to get busy making tunnels and being ant-like.

Unfortunately, it appears that one ant got crushed by the tweezers because he kind of just laid flat on his back on the tunnel steps. Ant #2 seemed sluggish, and only Ant # 3 at least walked around a little. We gave up watching and, the next morning, ran to the Ant Farm to see how they were doing. Mysteriously, 2 ants were missing and only Ant #3 remained. What happened?? I could only imagine that Ant # 3 was a cannibal. By the morning of day 3, Ant #3 was also missing.

A few minutes later my son found an ant (presumably Ant #3) crawling on the floor. Unfortunately, I then had no choice but to banish the Ant Farm from our home, as the thought of escaping ants was entirely unacceptable. My son begrudginly agreed and we dismantled the farm and sent it to pasture.