Obviously you can go out and kneel down next to an ant mound and try to capture them one at a time with a pair of tweezers, but 1) thats tedious, laborious and time-consuming, and 2) you hurt the ants in the process (I prefer feeding my doodledoods strong healthy ants that they can engage in a proper battle!)
Anyway I think I've come up with a simple no-mess solution ... just get a piece of dried fruit (it doesnt even matter if its very out of date because it still has the sugar that the ants are after), and sit it somewhere in your garden -- obviously next to an ant mound is preferable, but obviously you can sit it anywhere and ants will eventually find it. Then whenever you want to get some ants just take a plastic cup and a pair of tweezers out with you (i just use the plastic tweezers that came with the Doodlebug Deluxe Kit, they work perfectly for this) and pick up the piece of dried fruit and tap it against the inside of the cup - several ants will fall off into the cup without being harmed. Then you simply hold the plastic cup over the doodlebug tank/enclosure and tap the ants out with the tweezers.
You can then put the piece of fruit back down, and repeat this day after day after day, for weeks if not months.
So there is no messing around with liquids or sticky things like honey, and no need to constantly replenish the 'bait' because you can leave a piece of dried fruit outside for weeks and ants will keep returning to it.
Anyway hopefully that will help some new doodlebuggers
If anybody has any other ideas about good/easy ways to collect ants for food I'd love to hear them!
ps. my doodledoods are named Tom, Dick and Harry - named after the three tunnels that allied (including Aussie) soldiers dug during WW2 (see the classic movie "The Great Escape")
