A caution about Harvester Ants!  After setting up what I had thought would be a long term art / science project, and while doing research on Red Harvester Ants, I have learned they are related closely to wasps and bees.  Being allergic to bees, I will now have to proceed differently, perhaps not working with ants at all.

I wish all of the ant farm packaging and pages had mentioned this relationship between Harvester Ants and bees.  I was swarmed by yellow-jackets when I was 5, having over 500 stings at once.  Bee stings are life-threatening to me, and now I have to suddenly view Harvester Ants in the same way.  Ughhh!  I am surprised the close relationship is not required on ant farm packaging that is mainly marketed to children.  Packages ARE marked that ants can sting, but the relationship to wasps and bees puts them in a different category.

The article I learned this from is at Desert USA .  I will be doing some other specific art project in the future.  For the ants I currently have, I believe I will be putting them in the Uncle Milton's Light-up Gel Colony habitats I have.  They do not need to be fed or watered in a gel environment, and there is much less chance of being bitten or stung.  When I was a kid, I used to collect regular old black ants, but Red Harvester ants are the ones provided with ants farms.  I can, of course, use photographs for reference on ants and work that way.  That would be different from my usual preference of working from life, but if I decide to proceed with studying ants, it is safer.

I made a short video of viewing the Red Harvester Ants in a natural soil environment.  While doing that, I also was deciding whether graphite or color is best to depict them. My video caption is:

"Although the gel ant farms and sand ant farms are excellent for viewing the red ants against a green or green-outlined environment, viewing them in a natural brown environment, soil, allows their natural hues to be more pronounced.  There is a subtlety to their color.  They are lighter in hue than the soil, so drawing in graphite, which is what I am doing, will capture the lightness of them against a darker soil.  I will add color if I am viewing them as red against a green environment"

I may also draw one ant design daily, instead of depicting the ant anatomy scientifically.  This would be similar to some ACEOs I have done, and also similar to the many pears I have drawn and painted over the years.  I want to draw daily, but do not always want to take the time for a truly scientific drawing.  Like Vincent van Gogh and his sunflowers, I am sure each ant design will be slightly different, even if the exact same design is used.  It is sometimes comforting to just draw and not try to place impressions of mind on the paper.  I will be using my young harvester ant design as shown in a previous post.

My videos about the ant farms can be found at my YouTube Playlist