Black honeypot ant
The black honeypot ant is a black ant from Australia with a sweet secret. Some of its workers drink so much honey that their bellies swell up like little round grapes. They hang in the nest as a living pantry for everyone else.
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Fun facts
The honey-filled workers can swell to 17 millimetres, about twice as long as normal workers.
The honey workers cannot move. Other ants have to look after them.
Half of the whole colony are honey workers.
Its nest has a tunnel going about one and a half metres straight down into the sand.
Its honey can fight some germs, and Aboriginal Australians used it for sore throats.
Most asked questions about Black honeypot ant
?What is a honeypot ant?
It is an ant where some workers store honey in their swollen bellies, to feed the colony later.
?Can you eat honeypot ants?
Yes. Aboriginal Australians have collected them as a sweet treat for thousands of years.
?Where does the black honeypot ant live?
In Australia, mostly in the deserts of the middle, often at the foot of mulga trees.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Camponotus inflatus
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Australian honey ant, Black honey ant
Where the facts come from
- Camponotus inflatus (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.
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