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Carpenter Ants Get Their First Sugar High

2,250 views · Published 11 October 2012 · 3:53 · Indexed 18 October 2026

Channel: Melvin Wei · 2012 · Science & Technology

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I encountered this species of carpenter ants, Camponotus vicinus, in some hills maybe 200-250 meters or so above sea level on a windswept dry coastal sage scrub habitat. I poured out the contents of 3 packs of cafe/restaurant sugar, or sucrose, on the ground in a pile to see how the foraging ants along this ant trail would react to crystalline sugar, which they had likely never tasted in their lives. It appears that most of the ant workers were carrying grass seeds, but some of them ditched the seeds to smell and taste the sugar. I remember reading a long, long time ago that ants relish sugar sources because they eat a high-protein diet (typically seeds, meat, and so forth) and are thus constantly sugar-starved. As you can see, there are some soldier ants with big heads and jaws running alongside the worker ants

In all of my ant encounters so far in the wild (for YouTube), I haven't been able to get that characteristic swarm or river of ants that you see in houses around food sources. Perhaps it takes hours for ants to lay down enough pheromone scent trails to attract hundreds or thousands of workers to congregate on a food source, or most of these wild species don't engage in such behavior because none of their natural food sources require vast numbers to gather.

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