Desert Long-Legged Ants (Novomessor cockerelli)

Product Description

These long-legged ants are very active and fun harvester ants. They are particularly entertaining to watch as they chase down fruit flies and other small insects. This species of harvester ants grow in numbers rapidly, making them great for kids.

Ant Holleufer has a fantastic YouTube video featuring these ants! Check it out here.

Growth and Diet

To promote fast growth, daily feedings, seeds, and a heat cable are recommended. However, to slow growth, you can do the opposite — skip the heat cable, remove seeds, and feed them less frequently. Their main diet consists of mealworms, cricket pieces, Dubia roaches, and fruit flies. For sweets, options include Sunburst, hummingbird nectar, fruits, and sugar water. Supplemental seeds like crushed sunflower seeds, dandelion, and bluegrass are favored but can create a messy outworld if not cleaned regularly. For this species especially, we recommend you buy The Ant Vacuum if you offer seeds that have husks because they make a real mess in the outworld.

Housing:

We generally sell our ants in test tubes. If local pickup is an option for you and the colony is large enough to move into a formicarium, we may be able to move the colony for you provided that you buy the setup from our store.

Escape Prevention

These harvester ants are skilled climbers and may try to escape, so fluon should be applied bi-weekly to prevent their escape. Fluon is a liquid that dries slippery so the ants cannot crawl through it.

Live Arrival Guarantee

See our policy here.

Shipping or Local Pickup

Currently, we are permitted to ship within Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas. Your order will not get processed if your shipping address is outside of these states. Info about our USDA permits can be found here. Local pickup is available in Ahwatukee which is within the Metro Phoenix area.