In your house, you have rooms and connecting halls. Ants that live underground also have rooms called chambers and connecting halls called tunnels. As ants dig the tunnels and chambers, the dirt is carried up to the surface and dumped, creating anthills.
You can make a model of how the chambers and tunnels of the underground home of ants.
Discover for Yourself
1. On one of a sheet of 9-by-12-inch (22.5-by-30-cm) brown construction paper draw 2 hill shapes. Make the hills about 5 inches (1.25 cm) apart, 1 inch (2.5 cm) tall and 2 inches (5 cm) wide.
2. Cut out the hill shapes.
3. Draw 5 large closed curved shapes on a lighter brown sheet of construction paper.
4. Cut out the shapes and glue them on the paper as shown.
5. Cut strips of paper from the light colored brown construction paper.
6. Ant chambers, like the rooms in your house are used for different things. Label the chambers: Nursery, Queen, Eggs, Food, and Trash as shown.
7. You can cut pieces of paper to represent the Queen. Use your own imagination–what do you think a queen ant should look like? Does she have a crown? I’ve represented her as being very big. The queen lays eggs which are placed in a chamber. Eggs develop into very tiny larvae which form pupae. The larvae and pupae can be placed in the nursery. I have represented the larvae with raisins and the eggs with rice grains.Food can be anything that ants can carry. Trash is waste as well as dead ants. Periodically the worker ants carry out the trash and dump it on the hill that forms outside their doorway.
More Later, Janice
More investigations for young children.
