Odorous house ant
The odorous house ant is a tiny brown or black ant that loves sweet things. It often marches into kitchens looking for sugar and water. If you squash one, it smells like a rotten coconut.
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Fun facts
One colony can have many queens and live in several nests at once.
It looks after aphids, like a farmer with cows, and drinks the sweet honeydew they make.
It is very tough. Some queens have lived for over two months without food or water.
A colony can have from a few hundred to tens of thousands of ants.
It likes ordinary table sugar best of all the sugars.
Most asked questions about Odorous house ant
?Why does the odorous house ant smell?
When it is crushed, it gives off a smell like rotting coconut or blue cheese. That is how it got its names.
?How big is an odorous house ant?
It is tiny, about 1.5 to 3 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Tapinoma sessile
- Named by
- Say, 1836
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Sugar ant, Stink ant, Coconut ant
Where the facts come from
- Tapinoma sessile (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 AntWeb.org. 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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