The Yellow Meadow Ant In Oklahoma

The Yellow Meadow Ant (known locally as the Amber Meadow Ant) is one of the most common types of ants found in Central Europe but they are occasionally found in the United States. We’ve seen them pop up from time to time in areas around Oklahoma, like Tulsa, Owasso, Broken Arrow, even Stillwater, and Oklahoma City.

This species of ant is subterranean, living primarily underground, in pastures and, when we notice them, lawns. The Yellow Meadow Ants around here are known to swarm in July and August. The end of summer is generally when we start getting reports of these flying insects that might be termites. We’ll come out to inspect and discover that the swarming insects are actually Yellow Meadow Ants. Because of the confusion, we thought we’d take a moment to review some information about these ants to hopefully clear things up.

As their name suggests, these ants are a yellowish-brown in color. However, their color varies within the different types of ant castes, with the workers being a lighter shade while the queen and males are more darkly colored. Worker ants are around 2 to 3.5 mm long, males about 3 to 4 mm, and the queens are a whopping 7 to 9 mm in length.

Yellow Meadow Ants generally eat other insects that are found in grasses, but they are also known to ‘farm’ aphids on the roots of grass and plants in order to harvest and eat the sweet honeydew that the aphids give off.

These ants tend to avoid sunlight by living mostly in the safety and darkness of their intricate underground nests. Typically the only time we can find the colony’s underground nest is when they build nest mounds above the ground on lawns and pastures. We’ve seen some of these mounds get as big as a basketball! You may have even noticed a nest mound or two popping up in your lawn after the heavy rainfall that we had earlier in the summer.

Yellow Meadow ants are thankfully harmless to humans because of the great amount of effort that it takes for them to bite or sting us. They are, however, quite the annoyance when they make an appearance in your lawn or present themselves as swarming ants parading around as possible termites. Don’t hesitate to contact the ant experts from Emtec Pest Control if any signs of these ants are bugging you. We even offer a FREE inspection!