Bug card No. 0017 of 1,500
Allegheny mound ant
Formica exsectoides
The Allegheny mound ant has a red-orange head and chest and a dark brown back end. It builds some of the biggest ant hills of all, up to a metre tall. Many ant mounds can be joined together by tunnels into one huge ant city.
Lives in
Eastern North America, from Nova Scotia down to Georgia, in open fields
What does it eat?
It hunts all kinds of small bugs for meat, and collects sweet honeydew from aphids for sugar.
How fast is it?
A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Allegheny mound ant about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
Its mounds can be 1 metre tall and 2 metres wide.
2
The sunny mound works like a warm oven that helps the eggs and babies grow.
3
Unlike most ants, one colony can have many queens.
4
It takes about two and a half to three months for an egg to grow into a grown-up ant.
you asked
Most asked questions about Allegheny mound ant
?How big are Allegheny mound ant hills?
Some reach 1 metre high and 2 metres across, and several mounds can be joined by tunnels.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Formica exsectoides
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Allegheny mound ant (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 April Nobile. 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 [email protected] and we will fix it.
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