Ant Farm

It starts with one queen in one small chamber. She lays. Her first daughters go out looking for food. A few weeks of your attention later, you have a civilization across your monitors.

How a colony goes

1. The queen founds it alone. No workers, one shaft, one chamber. She raises the first eggs from her own reserves.
2. The first ants to hatch forage. Every one of them heads for the surface to look for food.
3. Then the colony grows. Food becomes eggs, eggs become larvae and pupae, and later workers start digging, nursing and scouting. Tunnels get carved grain by grain and the spoil piles up on the surface.

Things you can do

• Feed them: sugar, seeds, honey, crumbs or water. Click the sand to drop it, then watch a scout find it and the trail form.
• Tap the glass and they scatter. Dig or fill in tunnels yourself.
• Customize: five ant species, five soils (including blue space gel), four kinds of light, three zoom levels, up to 8x time-lapse.

Every monitor

• In Chrome or Edge, open Customize and click Every monitor. The browser asks to manage windows on your displays; say yes, then click once per extra screen and once inside each new window. It is one continuous farm, and ants walk from screen to screen.
• Add #embed to the address for just the farm with no controls, handy for kiosk and web-screensaver setups.