This website shows you how wood ants build super-colonies of ant-hives or nests. The image below shows a population of these ants close to Winterswijk in the Netherlands. The nest are connected with paths or ant-roads. And amazingly the roads do all lead to the two largest nests in the center of the population. Are these two nests the capitals of this ant-land? Why are these nests connected to all other nests in this area? Do they trade goods? Why do wood ants build cities and road structures like we do? Are they that intelligent? And… do people and the ants follow the same basic principles for urban planning?

It took two days to get all the information to draw this map. And there were more questions than answers. To find answers to these questions I decided to look for more wood ant populations. And the hand- drawn maps from populations and notes piled up… and up. In February 2008 I decided to grab all this dusty paper together to put it all on proper digital maps and in a database. This website is an easy to use web-version of the database. First of all to make all the data easy to use for myself. But also to show other people how great these ant-worlds are.

Ant’s road maps