How it started

I have always having liked pets, but mostly I have had the furry kind.  I have a dog named Annie, and for awhile I had some mice named Blaze and Zoey.  I really liked the mice, but after awhile the coughing and sneezing began, and got worse and worse.  Fortunately mice don't live that long, and I was able to provide them with a good home for their entire life time.

Once they were gone I did obscene amounts of research into my next pet, with worries about my allergies crossing over to other species.  I looked at hedgehogs, but thought their heat requirements were too complicated.  Birds, too messy and loud, and live too long! I looked at other rodent species, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, but worried to much about allergies.  I thought about reptiles, but again, their environmental requirements are quite complicated.  Then quite by accident I came across TarantulaCanada.com.  This was pretty exciting, no allergy problems here!  I wasn't at all interested in keeping tarantulas, but Tarantula Canada has a few other really cool creatures, like Amblypygi, commonly know as whipspiders, or tailess whip scorpions.

The first Amblypygi I got, a captive bred Damon diadema, got stuck in the mail and died a few days after arrival.  The second one made it to me on time, and has been thriving ever since.  I now have four of them. This led to other arachnids, and eventually, even a couple of (very tiny) tarantulas.  Fascinated by my new hobby, and driven by my ADHD, which tends to make me quite obsessed about one particular topic at a time, I was researching insects and arachnid pets like crazy, and found the AntsCanada.com website.  Well from the second I found it, I was hooked, I had to have an ant colony.  AntsCanada has a GAN (Global Ant Nursery) project that looked really cool, but with no GAN farmers in my area, that was out.  So I started looking everywhere for ant queens.

By the end of the summer I had over a hundred of them in test tubes in my dresser drawers.  Good thing my wife is tolerant of my new hobby.  I knew I would not be able to keep all these ants, so I signed up to be a GAN farmer myself.  That was in the fall, and only two of my queens produced eggs before winter.  One of them wasn't quite right - she ate her babies as they tried to eclose.  The other produced 3 workers that over wintered.  Over the winter I lost a bunch of queens, probably ones that were not fertile.  I hibernated my ants in a cold windowsill in the basement for about 3 months.  When I brought them out of hibernation, a population explosion occurred.  Currently I have about 30 colonies with either workers, larvae, pupae or eggs, or some combination of the above.  I sold my first colony a couple of weeks ago!  I hope I can sell more, because I really can't keep all of these ants, but I enjoy checking them every night and seeing their progress.  I check them with my room completely dark, and using a red LED light, so I don't disturb them too much.  They don't seem to even notice I am there.  Apparently a disturbed ant queen may eat her eggs. But it would take the fun out of it for me if I could only check them every couple of weeks.