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A backyard ant-keeping project has spiraled into a colony so large its own creator isn’t sure where to put it.
Mikey Bustos, the YouTuber behind AntsCanada, built his fire ant colony from a single mated queen after his previous colony, the “Fire Nation,” died out. That queen’s colony — now nicknamed the “Phoenix Empire” — has multiplied so fast that its current formicarium and outworld setup can no longer contain it. In this installment of his ant-keeping series, Bustos walks his audience through just how big the Solenopsis geminata colony has gotten and asks them to help him decide what comes next.
- The Phoenix Empire began from a single mated Solenopsis geminata queen after Bustos’s earlier fire ant colony, the Fire Nation, collapsed.
- The colony’s population boom has outgrown its existing multi-module formicarium and outworld enclosure, raising the risk of an escape.
- Bustos is crowdsourcing the decision to his “AC Family” viewers, weighing a custom high-security super-enclosure against moving the colony into a naturalistic soil vivarium.
From One Queen to an Empire
Every fire ant colony Bustos keeps starts the same way: one queen, alone, digging a founding chamber and living off her own fat reserves until the first workers hatch. That’s how the Phoenix Empire began, rebuilding from scratch after the Fire Nation colony died out. What’s different this time is the pace of growth — the queen’s offspring multiplied fast enough that the brood piles and worker numbers in this video visibly dwarf what a typical hobbyist setup is built to handle.
Fire ants in the genus Solenopsis are known for exactly this kind of explosive reproduction once a colony clears its early bottleneck, and Bustos’s footage of the current nest shows tens of thousands of ants packed into modules never designed for a population this size.
The Formicarium Problem
The Phoenix Empire currently lives in a multi-module formicarium connected to an outworld foraging area — the standard AntsCanada setup for large colonies. The trouble is that the colony has simply outgrown it. Bustos shows chambers so densely packed with workers and brood that airflow, moisture control, and even basic movement inside the nest become a challenge.
Fire ants are also aggressive foragers, and a colony this size puts constant pressure on any containment barrier. That combination — sheer numbers plus an aggressive species — is what pushes Bustos toward a decision rather than a patch job.
Tens of thousands of stinging fire ants, one overwhelmed formicarium, and a creator asking his own audience to help him figure out the fix.
Weighing the Options
Bustos lays out two realistic paths forward. The first is building a larger, custom-designed super-enclosure — essentially scaling up the same modular formicarium concept but with reinforced containment built for a colony this size. The second is transitioning the Phoenix Empire into a naturalistic soil vivarium, letting the ants dig and structure their own tunnels the way they would in the wild, while still relying on escape-proof measures like fluon-coated walls and moats to keep tens of thousands of fire ants from getting loose.
Either option comes with tradeoffs. A soil vivarium is closer to a natural habitat and can handle organic colony growth, but it’s harder to inspect and clean. A super-enclosure is easier to monitor and maintain but requires Bustos to essentially predict how much bigger the colony will get before he builds it.
Turning to the AC Family
Rather than making the call alone, Bustos puts the decision to his subscriber base, the “AC Family,” a community he’s built over years of ant-keeping content covering everything from queen founding to colony crashes. It’s a recurring dynamic in his channel — treating major colony decisions as a shared project rather than a solo call — and it’s part of why viewers who enjoy this kind of up-close look at aggressive, fast-breeding insect colonies also gravitate toward coverage like Top 5 Ferocious Hornet Moments or the population explosion detailed in Millions of Mice Are Terrorizing Australia.
Bustos doesn’t land on a final answer in this video — he leaves it as an open question for the comments section. Whichever way the AC Family votes, the next upload will show which enclosure the Phoenix Empire actually ends up calling home, and whether fluon and moats are enough to hold back a fire ant colony that’s already outgrown two setups in a row.
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