NAVADEAL Ant Farm Castle 2.0 with Connecting Tube, Ant Habitat Science Learning Kit, Best STEM 2021 Educational Kids Toy, Study Insect Behavior at Home & School, Plant Based Blue Gel 3D Maze Ecosystem

The media could not be loaded. This ant farm is awesome functions well and it’s fun to watch the ants. We bought it for our 5 year old and he loves it! We may even buy another one to attach and make it larger!- it does Not come with ants (as the description says. We bought ours from the suggested website and they worked well.- per other reviewers suggestion, we scuffed up the middle tube to help give the ants some grip because it is slippery. I do think it helped, as our ants can get to the top using it.

The media could not be loaded. The key to setting one of these ant farm is to be patient. The ants are not including you you do have to order them separately. The ants at first stay still and may look like that are dead but that’s not the case, that are actually slowly digging. In 3 days your ant farm will start to form. It’s very cool and your kids will love observing this. Easy to assemble , good quality , small but spacious.

The gel inside shrunk..Seller replaced the ant castle and this one is awesome. The ants are having fun digging around

It's fair to say that we didn't know a ton about housing ants before this purchase, but my son really wanted ants. I researched a bit, read many reviews, and took some time to make the decision to purchase this ant habitat. I liked the idea that the gel was nutritious for them. However, when I received this thing, the gel looked like it had shrunk far from its original state inside the habitat (like maybe it had been sitting too long and dried out).Despite that, we purchased and received 2 tubes of harvester ants and place them inside. The first thing we notice is how difficult it was for them to get to the food and water. The ones who got down there couldn't get back up without assistance. It seems the tubes are too smooth and when they tried to climb up they just slide right back down. Many ants were stuck in the bottom beneath the "feeding" area. It took them almost an entire week to start tunneling into the gel. They did not previously seem interested in the gel at all, and before that point had just been using the space along the edges and ends where the gel had shrunk and separated from the walls of the habitat. This includes all the way along the bottom underneath the gel.As I don't claim to be an expert on ants or their behaviors, it still seems to me that it's silly to think the ants are going to use this space the way we want them to. I had created a solution for the tube to help them get up and down. The first solution was non-toxic, waterbased paint. I thought maybe they just need something to grip. But they didn't like it and stopped using the tube all together, so I cleaned out the tube and simply used a hard brush to scratch the plastic on the inside to give them something to hang onto. Once they were able to go up and down more effectively, they proceeded to bring chunks of the gel down and put them all over their little water pad. I'm confused by that behavior but I'm sure there's a reason. They seem to also be placing trash on it, and I wonder, where are they going to get water from?Also, the instructions say to place the second water pad on the bottom floor of the feeding area for extra moisture in the habitat. The problem with this is that the only way to do that is to open one of the bottom holes, for example by pulling out the tube and that's just not a great idea in my opinion. So once that pad dries... It's just dry.The ants finally seem to be making this place their home after a couple of weeks, though I still can't claim to understand their behavior. Maybe I'm missing something. My son is happy with the ants, and the habitat overall but I think it could have been in better condition. I'm a bit concerned because they don't seem to be using the food and water area the way we had expected. There is a hole on the very bottom underneath the feeding area explained in the instructions as a way to dump out the dead ants, but who's to say this is where they will place them? And either way it seems a bit difficult to "dump" them effectively without escaping ants.Overall it was a decent purchase and has at least made my son smile for a time, but I think we will consider transferring our ants to something different.

Kids can’t learn anything from this “ant farm”. I homeschool my son and thought this would be a good way to show him hands on how ants live and work. It isn’t. The ants that I also ordered from Amazon. Which cost more than the ant farm by the time I paid shipping on live animals, but anyway the ants just lay there on that blue stuff. One or two will crawl around every now and again but basically they just lay there in a pile. I’ve given them food and water just as the directions say to do. They don’t try to tunnel through the blue stuff at all. And I totally expected it to be a lot bigger than it is. I guess they don’t need a really large home but when the description says “ant castle” you expect it to be bigger than what this product is. I was berry mom very unhappy with this purchase and would like to return it. I’m not sure I kept the box and by the time I get the ants out I’m not even sure it would be worth it. Anyway failed project for my son. This product definitely does not show kids how ants really work and live. The photo above is a week after we received it and set it up. It’s like that goo gets stuck all over them or something.

The media could not be loaded. Set up wasn't difficult. I bought two. I cut one tube in half to connect them side by side. Then connected the "feeding areas" to the tunneling area. I poked holes ( ended up slits) in the gel as suggested on comments section. The tubes of ants were cold ( arrived 2 days earlier), so they poured readily, one tube into each section. I placed the water cotton and a small bit of food. Only 4 ants were dead right off. They are very active. I can only post one video, but it took them ( one side only at first) an hour and a half to figure out how to get to the feeding area. Early on, I also put a small pinch of bread on top the gel at both ends of both setups. I figured they had to be hungry after being in the test tube for about 4 -5 days. Then I removed it a couple hours later. Overall, everyone is excited to see what they do, if anything, over night. ( 4 hours later they had tunneled down in the corner of one side. )Great past time. The only problem I see is the lids to the feeding areas are VERY loose. Watch your kids that they don't bump it off and release the ants. By the way, I didn't get bitten or stung, and I had to pick one up about 6 or 8 times! Be careful though.

I have had my ants since May 15. Everything was going okay. You cannot get to the bottom where they store their trash and food so I now have Tiny Maggots in the ant farm. I’m going to have to let my ants out and call it a loss. Super sad.