Reptile & Amphibian Forums

If any of you use the Scorpion from dirt Devil, mine is 3 years old and has been fantastic for collecting ants, so here is a product number: Dirt Devil Vibe Hand Vac - M0888VX which is a new number but still the same old vacuum for $19.99 at Target, may be some place cheaper but for the use and Target is just down the street. Thought any of you ant officinadoes might be interested in this info and if your collecting ants with anything else, I still think this is one of the best kept secrets with respect to an collection. I drill a hole in the handle end and ad a piece of PVC pipe about 30 inches long so when I collect I can stand off from the ant mound and not be stung or always worried about the ants getting to close. This thing works! Cheers!!!
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I used the Scorpion for several months a couple of years ago when they were a new product. Didn't care for it much and quickly switched to the Dirt Devil Extreme Power 15.6 volt.

I found the Scorpion's 7.2 volt power and charge duration to be lacking for any significant ant gathering missions and the sliding power switch seemed to be poorly designed and failed after a few weeks of semi-daily use. I also had trouble with the charger contacts. I tried about 4 Scorpions before giving up on them. I really wanted to get a reliable one because I loved the weight and balance, and the price was reasonable, but I hated having the charge run down on me so fast and the constant dumping of the relatively small bin.

They may have redesigned the Scorpion since I used them last, and the average person may not be gathering ants to feed a dozen Horny Toads like I am. It is a big step up from the chimpanzee method I started with 5 years ago; but I have found the Dirt Devil EP to be quite powerful, has a much larger bin capacity, and longer charge duration.

I am hard on the vacuums, but using these indoor hand vacs to gather ants is necessarily hard on them when you are sucking up so much dirt and rocks anyway on a constant basis. They weren't designed for it. I have taken a two tier approach to gathering lately. I also use a nifty Dyson Root 6 handheld for my initial attack, clearing the immediate area around the colony entrance of excessive workers which may pose a stinging threat. This is where you gather up the most excess dirt and debris, and the Dyson is great for that, because it really does keep great suction throughout and I don't have to worry about debris. With the Dyson, I can usually just pass the crevice tool a few inches above the ground and suck up the ants, leaving most heavy debris on the ground. The other paper filter type hand vacs lose suction and have to be emptied into a seperate container to keep good suction on the vacuum. Only problem with the Dyson is that it has a lithium ion battery which doesn't last very long and when it decides it's under voltage - it just quits cold.

Once I thin the immediate area a little with the Dyson, I move right onto the colony entrance and place the bevelled crevice tool of the Dirt Devil right over the colony entrance. This sucks up a fair amount of ants in short order without sucking up excess dirt and debris that is scattered about outside the colony. I also prefer to gather the ants that are already in the colony entrance and may be emerging to head out empty handed, rather than gather up all the incoming foraging workers outside which are loaded down with food for the colony. I prefer to let the incoming trail foragers pass by as much as I can. I get a few hundred workers from a colony and then move on to another so they can recover.

I get close in for my work, but having grown up in Solenopsis invicta buren country, I find Pogos to be relatively slow to attack and I can usually quite easily find enough time to get any errant worker off me before they get above my socks to sting. I get stung only once every few months when I'm in the field. I get stung much more often back at the house trying to sift and sort them, so I usually dump my vac bins into tupper-ware and place in the fridge until they go dormant. Once that happens, I take them outside to a screen sifter where I get rid of the sand and smaller rocks and debris. Once that is done, I place the ants with any remaining debris into galss jars set on their side above another bin. The ants warm up, and I blow into the jars to get them stirring. They make their way to the entrance of the jar and fall out into the storage bin below, leaving most of the rest of the debris behind in the jar.

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I guess it is a matter of taste, here, but I get what your say about the newer models and they are quite a bit more expensive for sure, ($50.00 I am sure you can find them cheaper) but I have had my scorpion for three years collecting up to 500 ants at a sitting for five horned lizards and I usually find I am making a trip once to twice a week, so that is quite a bit of usage that it has gotten, and yes its not designed for this kind of use, I love the crevice tool because I can suck them up as they come out of their hole, I added the pvc handle because "my" ants here are bodacious and will get right after you, so the added benefit of a few more inches away from the hole has made a great difference over-all for me. But I thought I would throw that out there for anyone that has a few horned lizards the price is right and works well, and while I can't make any comments about your experience with you original, mine has just been 5 stars. It still running well.But I decided its time for a new one. I do agree though the 7.2 battery has rundown to slow a few times when I would have liked it to last longer, but I have never failed to get what I needed unless the ants were not co-operative, I try and spread myself through 3 or 4 ant piles so no specific one is overly impacted, this seems to have worked well....
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I have an oreck car vacuum, and I picked up a 12 volt gell cell. It is there version of a car vacuum.I cut the cigarette lighter end off, added a few clips to accomodate the battery and put all in a small backpack.I have to charge the battery about ever three outtings, about once a month.The battery never runs down, when I need it most.Its collection chamber is a little bit small , but not that bad to work with.
I have not used it yet, but I did pick up a mini 12 volt canister type vacuum.Some use it for gold prospecting, picking up dust in crevices and such. Got it off ebay for 30 bucks or so.
Oh yea, my daughter routinely finds these small car vacs at garage sales for a buck.I believe I can get two summers out of of one and its nice, all fits in a small backpack.I put some light oil around the top of my collecting container to keep them from climbing out, but those are our michigan ants.They can climb..................................Scott.

Amen to the garage sale vac. The cheapest one around.

So none of you guys are using the pitfall method? I can get 500 to 1000 per nest and be done with about 10 nests in an hour or so. Sometimes I can even get up to 2000 if the nest is just swarming with activity. We are starting to see a lot of activity here finally.
Speaking of swarming, there is a black pogo in NM and S.E. AZ that will literally swarm anything that moves toward their nest. I've tried to collect them several times but it's very dicey. Not like the rugosus or barbatus I am used to.

It's funny to hear others ant stories. My wife thinks I'm the only fool out there collecting.

How is the activity in Texas anyways? It's starting to get hot here and the green of spring is now a decided brown in much of the Sonoran Desert.
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I have two separate areas I collect from.One has about thirty ant hills, and a lot of underground tunnels 6 or 7 feet from the mound.We don't have to deal with the stinging ants most of you guys do.When I add ants to the HL's enclosure, i actually put my hand in the container, and they attack and bite some, and I brush them off my hand in with the HL's.There smaller and the Hl's don't consider them as much of a threat.I usually add them to an area where there away from so as the ants move throughout the enclosure, they get picted off.I usually leave dirt in with ants, as they make there own ant hill in the container.I add pieces of apples,maybe some orange or a few roaches to the ants for food, and I wet down the container immediately when I get them home.Seems moisture is the number one thing that keeps them going.I can go through several thousand in a week, with only 6 or 8 dead ones in the containers.I really need to try the new canister vac, but the old one just keeps going and going.Must be that orecks vacuums just keep going and going.It does squeal some.The only problem I have with the pitfall method is that sometimes when I start to vacuum, they will rush underground.So it's easier to ambush them, tap on the mound some in different areas, and every now and then, you hit a spot and they swarm from it and bam , there in the vac and in my container.

The expense of the more powerful vacs I am using is well offset by the numbers of ants I can gather with them. I not only can supply my dozen HLs with about 800-1000 per day, but sell the surplus. One of those $50 vacs can pay for itself in one outing, and I plan on having a charger bank full of them in the trunk soon. Like I said, for the average person it may be a bit much, but it can also quickly get you enough ants to store for a month if your just keeping one HL.

I typically visit 30 colonies in an outing and spend about 2 minutes average at each. The Dirt Devil 15.6 volt usually holds up the whole way. Average yield is 500 per colony. Some yield more, but I tend to halt at 1000 per colony if I have visited it recently or it is not a visibly large colony. If there is not much activity or the yield not strong within the first minute, I quickly move a few yards to the next. Sometimes I place the crevice tool over the top for a few seconds, causing the suction to encourage workers to get stirred up and come out, much like the blowing method that some use.

The pitfall method would be too time consuming here in this rock and soil and pre-dug holes would not remain long for subsequent visits. The Pogos here also do not always use defined foraging trails, or frequently change trails, and I try to avoid capturing workers carrying goods.

I had about 200 colonies mapped out when I decided to stop counting. About 80% of what I'm visiting are highly active right now, and I'm getting calls from landowners to come thin out the ants. Highest temp so far yesterday ( 91F ). Still not much herp activity yet.

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Thanks for sharing your perspective. I appreciate it.

I don't use a map, but after 4 years I know more ant nest by heart than I care to admit. I also have many areas I collect from over about a 50 square mile area so I don't have to worry about depleting any one nest.
There are a few that I've collected from over the course of 4 years now, and they seem none the worse for wear. I would estimate that I've taken as much as 5000 per year from some of these with little noticeable effect. Hard to say what a scientific study might actually show as far as impact, but that is for another day.

Last year I located a very good barbatus area here in AZ. The size/mass is double or so that of rugosus. So there are three species I can collect from, the large barbatus down to the small maricopa.

So if you are in a sharing mood still I have a question.
Do you price based on weight, or actual count. If by weight, is it weight of 500 barbatus (or whatever incriment you use)? Raw? Hydrated? Fed?

Do you sell other species? If so, do you sell them by that same weight per $?

It seems having several sizes to choose from would be a benefit to the community, but the small ones are as difficult (or more so) to catch than the rugosus or barbatus. They won't go nearly as far with adults, but are very helpful for hatchlings.
If you don't have smaller Pogos, how do you deal with hatchlings?

Just some random thoughts and questions on ants...
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There are far too many colonies within a 15 mile radius of my house to actually need the maps anymore, but they were useful later to spot new colonies that had appeared where none were before, and also to determine which might have died out or moved. I recently revisited some locations that I hadn't been to in 2 years. Almost all colonies I started visiting 3 years ago are still around. A few just didn't come back after winters, some were destroyed by landscaping, and some have been under attack by other smaller parasitic ants. I witnessed one actually moving to another location 20 yards away one night.

I do a few hand counts every year to stay calibrated within reason to both a scale and a visual measure. They are weighed straight from the wild after refrigeration, then measured visually in a marked container while completely dormant.

For hatchlings, there are a few locations with some smaller size workers I can use, though I never determined if they were a subspecies or just a lot of young workers there. I usually get enough small workers that I am able to pick out by hand and place in another container. I also raise a small amount of crickets and allow the nymphs a way to make their way into the tank ad libitum, as well as culturing fruit flies in home made medium.

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I've observed that nest moving phenomena quite a few times over the last five years, but last year I saw something unique. An older nest was completely taking over a younger one that was about 15 feet away. They were actually stealing the young larva while the small nest workers more or lest stood by. I didn't watch the whole thing unwind but it was food for thought. It made me wonder how many of the "moves" I saw were actually conquests...???
P. Rugosus nests are rarely found within 50 feet of each other. That seems to be about the same for the P. barbatus I've observed here as well.

Regarding the smaller ants, I saw the same thing with P. californicus and brought it up with Gordon Snelling. I thought I had discovered an unknown (to me) species. His thoughts were that it was just a new/young nest. Since then I have found many juv P. rugosus nests and the workers will be less than half the size of older established nests. As you say, great for hatchling food if you can find them.

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What I saw most recently was a colony that I visited frequently, moving everything in the night to a new location, which did not exist the last time I was there. It was right on the path. During the hotter parts of summer, I hunt snakes and ants at night. The Pogos here are active on warm nights.

I talked to Gordon about the ones I found. Small and orange phase. I figure they were either P. texanus due to the very small colony size and construction of the entrance, or it was young workers and a young colony. Was going to send some to him, but forgot.
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Have you done anything with bruchid beetles or anything similar? Here they infest ironwood seeds (olneya tesota), palo verde, and mesquite. I think you have a lot of mesquite in TX.
These are working out very well for hatchlings and adults and don't seem to affect their appetite for ants like worms or even crickets can.
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Yes, we have an abundance of mesquite here. Some people think it's the state tree. I use the bettles on occasion when I find seed pods with them. I've used different things to get feeding response back up when some HLs got burned out on the standard fare, but I'm very conservative with what I don't know.

Right now my female hernandesi is on food strike after wanting nothing but Pogos for the last 2 months. She is just getting over about 12 weeks of illness, and just now back over 40g. I really think the Pogos had something to do with the recovery. I had 6 that were ill, and none if them improved until it finally got warm enough to gather Pogos. The juvenile solare has doubled her weight just since I started gathering Pogos. I believe I responded to a post about solare weights a while ago, and cited a weight of 25-27g or so for her. She is now 44g. The hernandesi at the present time cares only for anything with wings. Won't touch a cricket, or waxworm, dusted or not. Watching her have a go at June bugs is quite entertaining, but she can't tackle that. I have experimented with what appears to be Mayflys, and she does likes those.

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Like Scott, I've collected red harvesters with a small 12v car/boat canister vacuum powered with a 12v 4.5a gel battery. The battery would last about a month, and charged right back up in hours. It worked flawlessly... I was able to vaccum dirt, rocks and of course ants with no problem at all. The entire thing cost me about 25 or 30 dollars. You could probably still get the same plastic vacuum at Rite Aid for about ten dollars. I got a small charger for about 12 dollars at a electronic surplus store. I've also seen these chargers a few bucks cheaper at a local store known as Harbor Freight tools. They're online as well.