Acrobat Ants from Beehive
On May 20, 2023 I was cleaning up a beehive in preparation for installing a new package of bees, and when I opened up the cover I found that some tiny ants had built a little nest between the inner and outer covers.
These are pretty clearly Acrobat Ants, a genus of ants that I previously posted pictures of way back in 2011. Their shiny, heart-shaped abdomens, that attach in such a way that they can easily be flipped up to point upwards, are very characteristic of the genus.
They were tending their larvae, which were just kind of piled up in heaps. And larvae are kind of featureless blobs, that the adults just feed until they get bigger.
The larvae were roughly sorted by age, with some heaps consisting of small larvae, and others consisting of bigger larvae.
There weren’t any I could see that were in cocoons or clearly near maturity, suggesting that the nest probably overwintered as a ball of adults protecting the queen, and she most likely just started laying eggs a couple of weeks ago.
Acrobat ants are in the genus Crematogaster, and according to the AntWiki range maps there are only two species in this genus that live in Michigan, Crematogaster_lineolata and Crematogaster_cerasi. These are really similar ants, but the distinguishing feature given on those pages is that C. lineolata has hairs on the pronotum (the first part of the thorax), while C. cerasi does not. So let’s have a look:
I don’t see any hairs on the pronotum, so these are most likely C. cerasi.
These ants generally tend to build nests in pre-existing voids like gaps under bark, pieces of wood, crevices, hollow stems, empty acorn shells, and the like. They eat almost anything that has sugars, fats, or proteins. The AntWiki page says that “They readily come to baits of sausage or Keebler Pecan Sandies cookies”, so they are easy to lure out of hiding. I expect that they would be really easy to keep in and ant farm, except for the detail that if they get out, they will infest your house pretty readily, too. And, given that they are so tiny, it would be hard to watch them without a magnifying glass.
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