Today’s interesting fact has to do with the Pharaoh ant.

Pharaoh ants are small tropical ants that are yellow or light brown in colour and almost transparent.

No one is exactly sure where they originally came from, although the West Indies and Indonesia have been suggested.

We may never know their exact origin, but they have been introduced just about everywhere in the world that humans live.

Each colony can have up to 200 queens, with between 1000 and 2500 workers in them.

Each nest is very small and a number of them together can suggest that massive colonies exist.

Colonies reproduce by budding, where a small number of ants containing a cross section of types, will leave together to a new home.

A single colony can populate a large building through budding in less than six months.

Pharaoh ants do not have a nest mate smell, so unlike many other ants, individuals that end up in the wrong colony are treated the same as original inhabitants.