breeding a new ant?

[odesssus]

Kyle said yesterday how bull ants have to be taken from the wild and that got me thinking. do you think it would be possible to artificially inseminate a queen and so protect wild ants and also may be breed a new species of ant designed for the pet trade? make them bigger and more friendly. I've seen a t.v program where they where using electricity to milk spider venom maybe you could do that to a male and store his sperm. or once I remember reading about breeding bees like ants they mate on the wing the way they did it was to stick a female on a straight wire that had a small motor at one end this made the wire go around in circles they then let the male in and they got them to mate. if a female does not mate the same day as the rest of the queens she keeps her wings that must be in hope of mating another day so perhaps you could keep her until the males from another nest and species are ready to mate?

[Wood~Ant]

I believe that under laboratory conditions, ants and other female insects have been mated artificially; but it would take an expert to inseminate a small ant queen, so natural mating is by far the best way to make a queen ant fertile.

As for making ants friendlier?

Owing to the size of their brain, and their genetic code which has evolved over millions of years, the instinct to defend themselves against anything which does not have the same colony scent is very strong. It isn't the fact that they are friendly, or unfriendly, it is purely a preservation thing. Much like some of us might welcome alien visitors from another galaxy, while some of us would attack and kill them on sight; so it is with ants, as some are fairly placid while other species are extremely aggressive and violent.
To get insects to grow bigger you'd need a much more oxygen rich atmosphere than we have now, like it was back in the Jurassic period when Dragonflies were 4 or 5 times larger than modern day species.
So ants and other insects will never grow larger while man is around polluting the planet with excess CO2 and other noxious gases, unless global warming changes the world climate and oxygen output in the future

Don't forget, ants evolved from prehistoric wasps; and have you ever met a friendly wasp? I certainly haven't, as I've been stung too many times to say I love wasps; but even though ants can, and do sting, I still have a great affection for them, as unlike wasps you can keep ants and bees to some extent, in an artificial set up in or around your home

[Deleted]

No doubt if breeding a new hybrid ant was possible all kinds of sinister plans would materialize.
I can just imagine the breeding line: First of all cross the Argentine ant with the red fire ant. This would give you a new super invasive species with enormous interlinked colonies. Then cross this with the Bullet ant to increase the size and give it the most painfully sting possible. And finally breed this with the Bulldog ant to give it excellent sight and the ability to jump.
You would then have a super invasive, giant, jumping hybrid ant with a deadly sting. You could probably get funding from the U.S. government - with the aim of dropping some queens onto North Korea and Iran!!!