Product Description

Have your ants outgrown the farm life, and are ready to crank it up to the next level? This one is wicked-from Uncle Milton comes Extreme Ants Live Ant Habitat. Everything (except the actual ants) is included for your gang of six legged wonders to thrash and shred! With this kit you'll have a crazy, amped-up crib waiting for them to get gnarly. Antrageous loops, ragin' street luge speedway, and radical rock climbing wall are among the features of this totally killer ant habitat. Includes tunneling sand, ant watcher's manual, and more. Does not include live ants - Uncle Milton sends you the ants by mail after you mail in the live ants coupon. For ages 6 and up.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193609 in Toys & Games
• Brand: Uncle Milton
• Model: FM-UMI-28
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 10.00" h x 7.00" w x 14.25" l, 2.80 pounds

Features

• Xtreme Sports Park just for ants!
• Awesome 360° live ant tunneling zone
• Trick towers, vertical ramps, gravity loops, climbing wall, bungee jump, street luge speedway, and BMX biking arena

Customer Reviews

Better Than Fish
This is a great toy! My son received this for his 6th birthday last year. The coupon to send away for your ants is included, and they arrived pretty quickly. However, by the time they arrived in the mail, last October, we had misplaced the instructions on what to do when they got here. I emailed the customer support people (info at unclemilton dot com) and they quickly emailed us back some basic instructions, which got us going.

Looking at the tube, we did not see a frenzied, angry mob of impatient ants as we expected. Rather, they were all pretty quiet. Too quiet. We tipped them into the ant habitat, and they lay there in a heap. Two eventually struggled to their feet and staggered around a bit and drank some water. We phoned Uncle Milton, and the customer support folks at Uncle Milton were great. It's almost like talking to actors in character because they seem to really care about their ants and even anthropomorphize them a bit. Could they really love the ants this much? I couldn't tell for sure, but they sure were convincing. Anyway, they told us that sometimes the ants are a bit listless at first, but to give them 12 hours. If they were indeed dead, then the living ants would "see to their burial."

Twelve hours later, it was pretty clear that most of them were dead. The two living ants moved all the dead ants into a pile in the center of the central part of the habitat, then they themselves expired shortly thereafter. We rang the folks at Uncle Milton back up, and they were extremely solicitous about our ants having "passed away." (I just love these people.) They sent us a coupon to order a new tube of ants.

Fast forward six months and we got around to ordering a new tube of ants. They arrived a few days ago. (Uncle Milton only ships certain times of the year, and they check the weather reports for the route before they ship.) These ants were all alive and active. We stunned them with a 15 minute visit to the refrigerator then dumped them in the habitat and they set to work reshaping the landscape, after an initial confusion over the rock climbing wall (they all piled up at the bottom for a bit, but figured their way out soon enough). They moved the dead pile of ants from the first batch to the BMX biking arena (the lower portion down the road). This area we have termed "the mortuary." About twice a day they might move half of the ants around in here, perhaps from one trough between the motocross jumps to another, or bury them with sand and then unbury them. Most of the dead ants are kept down here. Two are kept in the upper part of the habitat and moved around almost continuously, somewhat like the Olympic torch.

Of course, you need to read all the directions and never let your kids touch the ants. (You probably don't want to either.) My kids (ages 4 and 6) are really good now and won't try to carry the ant farm around, although the 4-year old did carry it once when we first got it and received a lecture about how it would make the ants carsick to be moved around like that. We just leave it on the kitchen island for everyone to watch and enjoy. I don't think you need to send away for any of their extra things, like food. They are happy with a few drops of water, plus a tiny crumb of bread damp with water, a pinhead-size piece of apple or other fruit, a tiny bit of hard-boiled egg white, a drop of honey mixed with water, a single dead fly, or a tiny piece of hamburger. They don't need much.

They are bringing us much enjoyment. We love to go back and check-up on them and see what they've been doing, or follow one ant's activities for a while. It's funny when one ant is on some sort of mission ("must carry this piece of sand downhill") and another ant bumps into him, he seems to forget where he was going or what he was doing, drops his sand and starts on a different project. Then, of course, there's Flik's tunnel within a tunnel project...

Bad customer service!
We bought this for our 4 year old son for Christmas last year, because he LOVES bugs. After you buy the ant farm on the order form for the ants it says that they will not ship the ants unless it is warm enough. If we would have known this before buying it we would have bought it in the spring. Our ants did not arrive until March! A few days after Christmas our 2 year old daugther knocked it off our son's dresser and broke the large dome. I e-mailed Uncle Milton asking if I could buy another dome three times with no response! So I tried to call their customer service line and was never able to talk to a real person. My husband finally glued it back together. It wasn't pretty but it worked. When the ants finally came my son loved it and would watch the ants tunnel and carry food for at least a half an hour or more at a time. When the ants died we just got more from our backyard. Just make sure and pick only ants that are large enough not to go through the vent holes. While my son loved the ant farm the total lack of customer service will keep me from purchasing another Uncle Milton toy.

If only there were a better way to buy ants..............
We purchased this ant farm a few months ago. It is really cute. It has a skate park, street luge and bicycle park. It also has two built in magnifying glasses. The ants have alot of room to roam. We did not have any problems with the ants escaping. You just have to be sure to follow the instructions for putting it together correctly. It did take a couple of months for the ants to arrive which took away from the initial excitement when we purchased this toy and some of the ants were dead when they arrived (we live in Ohio and they were shipped from California). Our ants lived for a few months but now they are all gone. We don't really want to order more from this company and wait two more months. This is an eternity to the kids. It would be nice if there were an easier way to get the ants. Also you have to order the kit which includes ants, food, dropper for water, instruction booklet and poster of the ants anatomy.