Not that I'd ever be in the market for illegal wildlife, I find the whole trade abhorrent, but $220 for a pregnant queen of an exotic ant species that would spawn an entire colony and live for years doesn't seem at all expensive.
So I used to raise giant bugs for fun. Millipedes and rhinoceros beetles mostly. Only get the rhinos if you want a HUGE FUCKING GRUB for two years and a super cool beetle for like 3 months.
The grubs are gross and kind of a pain. You'll have a tank you have to keep close watch on for a couple years that is only dirt, because they don't really come out.
If you want big old bugs that are easy and cool, get Cameroon train millipedes. You used to be able to get African giant black millipedes, but there is a mite that destroyed that trade. But the train millipedes are almost as big. They're shockingly low maintenance and love eating vegetable scraps. And if you have a male and at least one female you are almost guaranteed to have a million billion babies at some point.
OK, but why? They are ants, they don't do anything useful as pets, you cannot play with them and you cannot observe them build their giant mounds in a glorified aquarium.
What an odd question, people have had ant colonies in terrariums as pets for decades if not centuries. And yes, you can observe them in terrarium conditions. This particular breed of ant is a little less violent than a lot of the species we're used to.
"The foreigners never came to the fields themselves - they would wait in town, in a guest house or a car, and we would bring the ants to them packed in small tubes or syringes they supplied us with."
i never got the appeal of having someone else do the only interesting part of anything for you
I mean, you're not going down there for one ant. You probably want to fill your carry on with them and digging up dozens of ant mounds on strangers land doesn't sound all that great
https://bugsincyberspace.com/about/
glad to say search shows no "queen" results, though idk if that means anything
The grubs are gross and kind of a pain. You'll have a tank you have to keep close watch on for a couple years that is only dirt, because they don't really come out.
If you want big old bugs that are easy and cool, get Cameroon train millipedes. You used to be able to get African giant black millipedes, but there is a mite that destroyed that trade. But the train millipedes are almost as big. They're shockingly low maintenance and love eating vegetable scraps. And if you have a male and at least one female you are almost guaranteed to have a million billion babies at some point.
i never got the appeal of having someone else do the only interesting part of anything for you
https://theonion.com/ant-farm-teaches-children-about-toil-de...
I don’t understand why people would build an entire industry around insect trafficking just to watch ants for a few days before getting bored of them.