Red wood ant
The red wood ant is a big ant with a red head and middle and a dark brown back end. It builds huge dome-shaped hills out of pine needles, grass and twigs in sunny forest clearings. Hundreds of thousands of ants can live in one nest.
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Fun facts
A big colony can have up to 400,000 workers and 100 queens.
Its ant hills can be several metres tall and wide.
Its foraging trails can stretch 100 metres from the nest, about as long as a football field.
Foresters sometimes bring these ants into a forest on purpose, because they eat lots of pests.
Most asked questions about Red wood ant
?What do red wood ants eat?
Mostly sweet honeydew from aphids, plus insects, spiders and dead animals.
?Why do wood ants build such big hills?
The ant hill is their home. It is built in a sunny spot and has lots of rooms for the queens, eggs and babies.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Formica rufa
- Named by
- Linnaeus
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia
- Also known as
- Southern wood ant, Horse ant
Where the facts come from
- Formica rufa (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 Richard Bartz, Munich Makro Freak. CC BY-SA 2.5, 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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