Harvester Ants

Harvester Ant Facts

• Species: Roughly two dozen harvester ant species live in the United States, nearly all of them in the West.
• Location: The Florida harvester ant is the one found here. Its range covers sandy parts of the Southeast, from the Carolinas down through Florida and west along the Gulf Coast. Western species such as the red harvester ant do not live here.

How to Identify Harvester Ants

Harvester ants are yard ants, not house ants, and they almost never come indoors. Their nests sit in open ground, sometimes close to a home, and the workers keep the area around each entrance clear of grass and weeds.

Getting to Know the Florida Harvester Ant

The Florida harvester ant is the only harvester ant native east of the Mississippi River, and it is the species you will meet here. The western harvester ants known for record-setting venom live far from Florida.

Identification: workers are reddish brown to dark red and larger than a typical fire ant worker. Unusually among harvester ants, workers come in a range of sizes, and the biggest have oversized, blocky heads. A brush of long hairs under the head, used for carrying sand and seeds, can be seen with a magnifying glass. Workers move steadily and deliberately rather than boiling out in large numbers.

Telling it from fire ants: a fire ant mound is a fluffy, irregular dome of soil with no obvious central opening. A harvester ant nest is a flat or low disc of bare sand with a single open entrance in the middle, often decorated with bits of charcoal, small pebbles and seed husks.

Habitat: open, sunny, deep sandy soils such as sandhills, pine woods, roadsides and sparse lawns. It is most familiar in North and Central Florida.

Diet: mainly seeds, which workers gather and store in underground chambers, plus some dead insects.

Activity: foragers are out on warm days from spring through fall, and colonies stay quiet underground in cold weather. Nests can extend several feet straight down, and a single colony can last for years. Read more about harvester ant stings.