You should have seen the commotion around our house about 3:30pm today after McKay picked up the mail. I noticed a little brown padded envelope with a return address of Hurricane, UT and I said, "McKay, your ants are here!" He went nuts and got the rest of the family as quick as he could to come and watch.
The ants arrived to go in the ant "habitat" McKay got as a Christmas present. It's called AntWorks and it contains some kind of gel used in space experiments that is good for the ants to dig and live in. (You can read more about it here.) The habitat came with a coupon to mail in for 20-25 harvester ants if you didn't want to find your own ants. (I suppose we could have tried fire ants, but nobody was game for catching them.) So we quickly sent off our coupon and $3.50 fee to Hurricane, UT (of all places) and have been patiently waiting for the ants.
This is how they came in the envelope:
(the vial was inside some styrofoam)
First, McKay had to poke a few holes in the gel to help the ants get started tunneling. (You can see he was so excited to do this he didn't even take the time to take off his jacket.)
Brian (who happened to be home from work early today because the power went out all over HP's campus) put in the ants, McKay hurried and clamped the lid down and everyone watched in fascination.
McKay moved the ants up to his room so he could plug in the base lights. They are blue lights that give the habitat a neat look and light up the gel area. Here they are with the camera flash:
...and without the flash...
Just before bedtime, we checked in on the ants again and the kids were jumping in excitement to see that they had already started digging. The ants bring up the little pieces of gel they dig out and leave them scattered along the top edge.
It was hard to pull them away for bedtime and I'm sure they will be checking it out first thing in the morning. I will post some updated tunnel pictures as they get to work!
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