Just use test tubes to start. For both the experienced hobbyist with many diverse colonies and new hobbyist just entering the hobby and unsure of their level of commitment to this hobby test tubes in cheap plastic basins offer many advantages over more complicated formicaria.
Benefits:
- Extremely cheap. Dozens or even hundreds of glass tubes can be had for the cost of a single commercial formicaria. This allows for young hobbyists dependent on their parents for money to purchase ant keeping supplies to be able to acquire enough material to keep many different queens and colonies at once rather than placing all of their hope in the success of a single colony or queen.
- Easily expandable. With open test tubes in a basin of some kind, you can continue to add new tubes as the colony grows.
- Test tubes provide a continuous source of water that in most cases: depletes slowly, is easy to maintain by adding new tubes as old ones become dry. If you are going to be unable to tend to your colonies for long periods, you can add several completely full water tubes to the formicarium to ensure that your colony will not run out of water. This is particularly convenient because unlike commercial formicariums with a finite water reservoir size, adding additional water storage to the formicarium requires no special materials or devices other than the tubes and cotton that you're already using to keep the colonies.
- It is very easy to block light from reaching individual tubes by creating a form fitting sleeve with some opaque material such as aluminum foil and tape.
- Standardization. The same size tube can be used to house colonies ranging in size from arbitrarily large (with the addition of tubes as necessary) to founding queens that you have just captured.
- Easy to clean. Dish soap, hot water, and a small brush are all that you need to clean your tubes for reuse. Most commercial formicaria incorporate large surfaces of porous materials as well as hard to reach nooks and crannies. There are several threads on this forum providing evidence about the unintuitive nature of how exactly to best clean those formicaria.
- Good record of success among diverse hobbyists keeping diverse species in diverse conditions for extended periods of time (years even).
- Transparent (duh). Unlike dirt nests there is no where for your ants to hide. This is especially beneficial for new hobbyists as they are well known to be impatient to the point of not infrequently digging up their dirt formicaria because they can't stand the uncertainty of waiting.
It is extremely unlikely that test tubes are the optimal setup for all ant species, but they've been shown to work well with many different species and considering the benefits listed above there is no reason for any new hobbyist that doesn't have infinite money to spend to not start with test tubes. Alternatively new hobbyists that are confident in their patience can do well with large jars filled with semi moist dirt/sand/whatever. Ants do live in the ground most of the time and it stands to reason that you couldn't go too wrong by keeping them in the same conditions in captivity.
It may turn out that the species you are trying to keep are not adaptable to a test tube environment, or it may be that you will progress beyond being satisfied with such basic formicaria. At that point you will be in a much better place to evaluate which commercial formicaria are worth while to purchase, or even to develop your own as many hobbyists do. It's important to remember that while these formiculture supply businesses may seems in some cases like well-established institutions they are in fact almost universally only a few years old. Ant colonies can live decades, and I have not seen much evidence that any hobbyists in the anglosphere are competent enough at keeping mature colonies for any appreciable fraction of their natural lifespan with any regularity. The implications of this skill deficit are that probably no formicaria on the market are well tested for any more than one or two species within close proximity to the developer; and even those that have had continuous habitation by large healthy colonies since their inception are unlikely to have been tested for more than 3 or 4 years. Further, when you see pictures and videos of impressively large mature colonies inhabiting these formicaria for a claimed continuous several year period the species at hand are often either some extremely adaptable tropical ant known in the "wild" for infesting areas of disturbed human habitat, or species that are otherwise invasives where the developer lives and are extremely amenable to being housed in pretty much anything that provides water such a various Tetramorium or Solenopsis in North America. In summary, a formicarium is not guaranteed to be any better than test tubes just because money is being charged for it and in fact may even be worse than test tubes.
Anyways, antsaustralia, is newer but I hear good things about him. I also like the look of his formicaria.
