Uncle Milton Ant Farm Gel Colony

Like many of you, I like to read a few reviews about a product before committing to a purchase. I did this with Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm Gel Colony and was surprised to see so many bad reviews at Amazon. But for me, the lure of this ant farm was just too cool to pass up. I was thinking that most of the reviewers who gave it one star just didn’t know what they were doing, and no way would I fall into the same traps. First off, ordering live animals through the mail is always a tricky proposition. If you live in Anchorage and are trying to order their ants in December, they’re probably not going to send them. Now I can echo some of the comments that Uncle Milton’s weather requirements for sending the live ants is a bit stringent. I live in a moderate climate and ordered them in what I thought was warm enough weather. But after reading the reviews, I also went to another supplier and bought a couple more tubes for about $5 each (including shipping). This supplier had them to me in a couple of days and almost all of them arrived alive. My recommendation is to send in the certificate to Uncle Milton, wait a while and if it takes too long or you get ants in poor shape, go to AntsAlive.com and order them there. They don’t have the prettiest website in the world, but their service was great.

Another lesson learned… do read the instructions about putting the ants in the habitat. Put them in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes to get them to calm down first. Even then you have about 90 seconds to get them into the ant farm before they wake up enough to start crawling all over the kitchen counter. I did this with my wife upstairs, hoping I would be done before she came down. I wasn’t and was scrambling all over the place trying to catch the rogue ants. She wasn’t real happy with my choice of locations for filling the habitat.

Another recommendation- don’t put two entire tubes into one habitat. I did this (after reading the reviews about too many ants dying). Alas, my ants did not die and I had way too many for one habitat right from the start. I ended up buying and connecting the Original Uncle Milton Ant Farm to it just to give them some breathing room. I thought this would be a neat experiment anyway, learning which substrate the ants would prefer- the gel or the standard sand. It turns out, they don’t seem to care. they dug some great tunnels in both and seemed equally at home in either. I will say that they are much cooler to look at in the gel though.

Overall, I can recommend either of the Uncle Milton Ant Farms. They’re great science kits and if your expectations aren’t way too high regarding the whole process, you probably won’t be disappointed.