Honeypot ant
The honeypot ant is a small tan ant from the dry lands of North America. Some of its workers drink so much liquid food that their bellies swell up like round golden balloons. They hang from the ceiling of the nest as living food jars.
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Fun facts
The honeypot ants get so fat that they cannot move. They just hang and wait.
In winter, when food is scarce, the other ants drink food from the honeypots.
About one in every four ants in a nest is a living honeypot.
A nest can hold about 5,000 ants and may last for more than 20 years.
The young queens and males fly out to find mates on a summer evening, usually the day after rain.
Most asked questions about Honeypot ant
?Why do honeypot ants have big bellies?
Some workers fill their bellies with liquid food and keep it for the whole nest, like living food jars.
?Where do honeypot ants live?
This kind lives in the southwestern United States and Mexico.
?How big is a honeypot ant?
Workers are about 3 to 7 millimetres long. The honeypots look much bigger because their bellies are so full.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Myrmecocystus mexicanus
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Mexican honeypot ant, Honey ant
Where the facts come from
- Myrmecocystus mexicanus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by AntWeb.org. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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