Arthur Lynn Carroll, ago 7,

What do ants eat?

You have seen black ants and brown ants, reddish ants and perhaps yellow ants. But apart from her color, one little ant looks dust like all the other ants in the world. In some ways she is like all the other ants and their ancestors. In other ways she is not. There are many thousands of ants in the world and different ants live on different foods.
Every ant has a pair of haws and many of them can bite your skin. But no grown up ant can swallow a bite of solid food. Some ants lick the sweet honeydew from the backs of aphid insects. Other ants eat only fungus plants and others feed on seeds. Certain fierce ants are meat eaters. They manage to devour all these different things even though they cannot swallow a single bite of solid food.
The harvester ant lives on seeds. She has a pair of extra strong pincer haws to tackle this tough food. She pinches off a bite and it goes into her mouth   but she cannot swallow it. The food goes into a special pouch which is dust behind her pincers. There it is soaked with saliva which dissolves the nourishment from the food.
The liquid nourishment is swallowed. But there is a small wad of solid stuff that will not dissolve in the ant's saliva. The ant spits out this small wad of solid stuff and goes on her way looking for more food. The ant has two stomachs, one for herself and one to store food for other ants in the nest. The liquid food she swallows passes down into her own stomach where she digests as much as she needs.
If food is plentiful, there will be more food than she needs. This extra food is digested and sent to her second stomach for storage. The busy little worker  hen runs along about her cr .less chores. Soon she may meat a hungry ant in the next.
The hungry ant uses her soft feelers to stroke the well fed ant. This is a signal. The well fed worker then coughs up s drop of liquid from her storage tank and passes it on to the mouth of her hungry sister or brother. The harvester ants stick to a diet of seeds and the ants that keep aphid cows live on honey dew. In the ant world there are hundreds of different diets. But each kind of ant eats its own kind of food.
Some experts tell us that there are at least 1,000 different kinds of ants in the world. Their wormy grubs can swallow solid food which is fed to them by nursemaid ants. Rut the grubs soon fall asleep in silken cocoons arid turn into adult ants. The grown ants can swallow only liquids. There is just no telling how many different foods are eaten by all the different ants.