PHARAOH'S ANT (Monomorium pharaonis)

APPEARANCE:

A Pharaoh’s Ant is a small (workers are 2mm in length) yellow-coloured ant with a darker coloured abdomen and is found throughout the world. The queen is larger than the worker ants and is 5mm long. The queen also has wings, although she is unable to fly.

BIOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR:

The queens often lay around several hundred eggs in their life-time and can live for up to a year. Pharaoh’s ants nest within buildings, with each nest typically containing several tens of queens, and many thousands of workers. The existence of so many queens within one colony allows Pharoah’s ants to build colonies quickly and spread throughout a building. In large infested buildings there may be a number of nests, which are usually very well concealed in inaccessible structural cavities and voids. The nests are inter-linked and cooperate in terms of finding and harvesting food.

It is mainly an indoor species, associated particularly with large facilities such as hospitals, prisons and blocks of flats. Pharaoh’s ants are well-known for their complex foraging tunnels and their use of pheromones to maintain routes. They were one of the first recored species of ant to use negative pheromones (repellent) to deter other ants within their colony from a particular route or area.

Pharaoh’s ants feed on a very wide variety of food sources, including starchy, sweet, fatty and protein-rich foodstuffs. In addition to human foods, they will also feed on food waste and debris, and even dead insects. Once a nest has found a suitable food source, large numbers of workers will quickly form trails to the food, in order to take it back to the nest.

ROGER'S ANT (Hypoponera sp.)

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A Roger’s ant is a small ant (workers are 2mm in length) with a uniform dark-brown colouration. The reproductive females have wings and can form mating swarms throughout the year.

BIOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR:

Like other ants,  the nests contain queens, workers and males, together with the immature stages. The nests are usually well hidden within buildings, and are not as large as those of Pharaoh’s ants, containing only a few hundred adults.

This species is predatory on other small insects such as fly larvae around drains, which it subdues with its sting. Being predatory, this species does not form trails; instead ants forage individually for prey. Their nests are often located near wet residues or in cracks and crevices near drains and behind broken wall tiles.

GHOST ANT (Tapinoma melanocephalum)

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The ghost ant is also sometimes called the black-headed ant. This ant is very small at about 1.5mm in length, with a dark head and thorax. The pale coloured, almost translucent abdomen and legs, gives the ghost ant its name.

BIOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR:

The ghost ant colony can be moderate to large in size, containing thousands of workers and numerous queens. Ghost ants have a preference for sweet foodstuffs, as they naturally feed off honeydew from plant-feeding insects, such as aphids. Although occurring mainly indoors, especially in flower pots, they may also occur outdoors around the footings of buildings or in log piles.