Little black ant
The little black ant is one of the tiniest ants around. It is shiny black, and a worker is only 1 or 2 millimetres long. Its nest can have more than one queen, and a few thousand workers.
How big is it?
How long is it?
How big is Little black ant compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
All its workers are the same size, unlike some ants that have big and small workers.
In summer, the queens and males fly up and meet in the air. Then each queen starts a new nest and takes off her own wings.
It takes about a month for an egg to grow into a grown-up ant.
In a lab, the queens lived about a year and the workers about four months.
It helps farmers by eating the caterpillars of some moths that damage apples and trees.
Most asked questions about Little black ant
?Why are little black ants in my house?
They are looking for food. They nest outside in the soil and come inside to search for crumbs.
?What do little black ants eat?
Almost anything, like dead insects, sweet honeydew from aphids and leftovers.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Monomorium minimum
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- North America, Europe
Where the facts come from
- Monomorium carbonarium (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.
Black garden ant
Bullet ant
Pharaoh ant
Argentine ant
Red imported fire ant
Yellow crazy ant
Brazilian yellow scorpion
Cardinal spider
African malaria mosquito
Greenhouse camel cricket
Italian scorpion
Rabbit hutch spider