One ant for $220: The new frontier of wildlife trafficking

The basic thing is just knowing what you need to start with, and really that's : - knowing the local species, what they look like, when they take their nuptial flights - buy some test tubes, and always keep with you a test tube with some cotton to block the opening - walk with your head down. Notice the ants. Try to see where the entrances to their nests are. If you can, try to id them (or take a picture and ask on discord)

What you're looking for is a queen that just mated. Sometimes they still have their wings on, most of the time they don't. They really, really big ants, at first everytime I saw a big ant I thought it was a queen, but the first time you see one you'll have no doubt about it. Look at pictures of winged males as well, you can see a lot of them flying around during mating but you need to distinguish them from females.

Then once you've captured a queen (I recommend 2 or 3 of them), you transfer them to another test tube filled 2/3 with water, blocked by a cotton ball, then closed with another cotton ball. Put the test tubes in a completely dark, silent place, where you'll keep them for a few months. During this time try to never bother them, don't look at the tubes, don't move them. This is the founding stage, of the queens are fertile and have been fecundated, and they're not stressed by the whole operation, they'll lay eggs. After a few weeks the first workers will hatch and that's when you should connect the tube to an outworld so you can feed them without disturbing them in their nest/test tube!

So really buy some test tube, read up on ants and look down, and you're set for a few months!

I think realistically businesses in other parts of the world have no incentive to fully enforce ethical provenance across the entire supply chain for these kinds of products, and in most cases, fully lack the capability either. You'd have to run some kind of ATF-kinda thing in a third world country where official rule of law is already dicey or absent.

We love moving plants and animals around if they're useful or pretty. Conservation efforts that try to stop this for certain species are a relatively recent thing

The grubs are gross and kind of a pain. You'll have a tank you have to keep close watch on for a couple years that is only dirt, because they don't really come out.

If you want big old bugs that are easy and cool, get Cameroon train millipedes. You used to be able to get African giant black millipedes, but there is a mite that destroyed that trade. But the train millipedes are almost as big. They're shockingly low maintenance and love eating vegetable scraps. And if you have a male and at least one female you are almost guaranteed to have a million billion babies at some point.