Distribution:  Worldwide.  Distributed throughout the entire African subcontinent.

Habitat:  Found in diverse habitats throughout Africa though scarce in alpine and desert regions.
 
Food and Feeding Methods:  Cocktail ants are fond of sugary substances and tend aphids and coccids, soft-scale insects, for the honeydew they excrete.  They secure this food supply by building small carton shelters over these insects to protect them from the elements and from their enemies, though the ants are able to reach them through small holes.

Behavior:  Social colonies, single breeding female per colony, aggressive, arboreal.  Like all ants, cocktail ants are social, living in colonies and building permanent nest structures.  Most cocktail ant species are arboreal, living under bark or in hollow branches.  The colony is composed of the breeding queen, female workers, males when bred for mating, and the brood of eggs, larvae and pupae.  The most commonly seen ants are the sterile, wingless female workers, some with massive heads and powerful jaws, known as soldiers.  The queen is the only member of the colony that is fertile and capable of laying eggs.  The only time males are encountered in the nest is when they have been reared for mating flights. 

Ants are able to distinguish one another from members of other colonies through a unique and complex odor, a mixture of chemicals derived from the nest material, objects in the immediate vicinity and the food they consume.  Workers from the Myrmicinae subfamily frequently engage in the exchange of regurgitated food from what is termed the ‘social stomach’. 

Generally ants have poor eyesight but are compensated with an acute sense of smell and sensitivity to ground-borne vibration.  When detecting a vibration, cocktail ants respond aggressively, swarming about in alarm, trying to locate the cause.  If the wall of a nest is broken open or the branch bearing a nest is banged, workers swarm out with their gasters raised in alarm and their abdominal glands exposed.  If disturbed or attacked, many cocktail ant species exude a sticky, white fluid, which has a strong unpleasant odor, from glands in the abdomen.  The fluid is a mixture of formic acid and pheromone, serving both as a defensive substance and as alarm pheromones.  The cocktail ant’s sting is spatulate and while they don’t sting with it, they use it to wipe the poisonous fluid onto the object in a lateral twisting of the abdomen, accompanied by frenzied biting.  This combination makes the ants very unpleasant despite their small size.

Life Cycle:  Cocktail ants nest under bark, in hollow branches or in carton boxes attached to the branches of trees.  The hollow swellings at the base of the thorns of Acacia drepanolobium, the ‘whistling thorn’ acacia, are common nesting sites for cocktail ants that tend numerous bugs on the same tree.

Carton nests are spherical in shape and black in color, their size varying according to the size of the colony inhabiting them.  They are often built in low bushes with the stems of the plants running through them.  Nests are made of chewed vegetable fibers mixed with salivary secretions of the maxillary glands of the worker ants, which blackens the material and acts as cement.  The walls are thin and papery, and the interior consists of irregular cells like those on a coarse sponge.

A new colony is started when winged males and virgin queens leave their old colony.  Only males and virgin queens have wings and those are retained only for the duration of the nuptial flight.  Once the flight is over, the males die after mating and the queens shed their wings before starting a new colony.  As the colony grows, the workers take away and protect the eggs, and then care for and feed the hatched young.  If a protein diet is fed to female larvae, they become reproductive.

The brood consists of eggs, larvae and pupae, which are not reared in specially constructed chambers like bees and wasps, but kept in the nest’s brood chambers.  Since the larvae are completely helpless, the workers must feed and clean them, and if the nest site is changed, transport them.  Though some ant species spin silken cocoons in which they pupate, none of the Myrmicine species, including cocktail ants, do.  Rather the pupae lie naked in the brood chambers.

Status:  Myrmicine species, including cocktail ants, are widespread in Africa.

 Adaptations:  Larvae periodically emit a clear liquid from the mouth and anus that is attractive to workers, who often solicit the fluids by stroking the head and abdomen tips of the larvae with their antennae.  It is likely that this behavior encourages care of the brood by the attendant workers.  Other insects that live in close association with ants appear to mimic the ant brood by producing their own glandular secretions that calm the ants and encourage them to feed the mimics.  Numerous relationships exist both inside and outside ant nests with flies, moths, cockroaches, beetles, spiders and other insects, in which some form of communication exists between the guest and the ant host.

Remarks:  The ant is the most successful social insect in terms of numbers and geographical distribution.  There are at least 8,000 but probably as many as 14,000 species and 250 genera of ants in the world.

Ants form 1 large family, the Formicidae, which is subdivided into 11 subfamilies, of which 7 occur in Africa.

Cocktail ants belong to the Myrmicinae subfamily and the Myrmicine are the most numerous and diverse ants in the world, showing a greater diversity of habits and structure than any other subfamily.  In Africa, they probably outnumber all other subfamilies together.

The many species of the Crematogaster genus are called ‘cocktail ants’ because of their habit of raising the abdomen when alarmed or disturbed.  The petiole is joined to the dorsal surface of the abdomen and this joint is very flexible, enabling the ant to cock its gaster.

Length:      Queen almost ½ in.     Workers 1/10 - ¼ in.