Hello Farm Friends! We are thinking about kids and teens out there and how they are doing with science. As 4-H volunteers who host clubs we are posting activities from the national headquarters that are available so kids and families can do projects at home during the pandemic. This article is to give you a glance at a 4-H at home activity. This one is about ants. “OVER 22,000 SPECIES Get this: There are 1.5 million ants for every person on earth! Ants have been around since before the dinosaurs, and today they have colonized every continent in the world except Antarctica (it’s too cold). Ants are successful because of their ability to adapt to their existing conditions and diverse habitats. There are about 22,000 species of ants worldwide (the ant family of species is called Formicidae), many of which are found in the earth’s tropical rain forests! ANTS ARE SCAVENGERS Ants are omnivores, which means they eat both plants and animals. An ant’s diet also includes meats, seeds, plants, and fungus. Really, they love to eat almost anything, but especially fruit, nectar and sugary items, including the flowers on fruits and vegetables. That’s how they pollinate plants, going from one sweet flower to another. They also drink the dew that gathers on plants. And ants are very social, working together to forage for food. It often takes many of them to bring back large pieces of plants, animals, and insects to eat and share. They leave a pheromone (smell) trail, to help them and other ants in their colony retrace their route back to the nectar or other food sources. ARE ANTS GOOD POLLINATORS? Unlike most pollinators, ants can’t fly from plant to plant, since they lack wings (at least, most of them). That makes them more likely to take nectar without effectively cross-pollinating flowers. They typically forage only short distances, making them inefficient at carrying pollen over long distances between plants and their nests. But some plants do need ants to pollinate them – particularly plants in harsh, dry lands, which seem to rely on ants because these are places where there may be few other pollinators available. These busy insects are often observed visiting inconspicuous, low-hanging flowers to collect the energy-rich nectar they crave by crawling into each flower to reach their reward. To access the entire article click on this link. https://4-h.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/4H-At-Home-Activities-Pollinators-Ant.pdf
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