Workers are roughly 5–8 mm long; repletes become greatly enlarged.
Fine-art photographic collection
Myrmecocystus wheeleri
A desert colony that banks surplus food inside the distended bodies of workers deep underground.
About this species
Honeypot Ant
Myrmecocystus wheeleriSnelling, 1971
Information reviewed15 July 2026
Myrmecocystus wheeleri is a North American honeypot ant of the arid Southwest. Colonies excavate deep nests and can produce replete workers that store liquid food through dry periods.
Taxonomy
Animalia · Arthropoda · Insecta · Hymenoptera · Formicidae · Formicinae · Myrmecocystus
Accepted taxon. · checked 2026-07-15
Southwestern United States and northwestern MexicoBroad range and selected reference localities — not a complete occurrence map.
Southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico
Arid scrub and desert soils.
Forages on the surface during suitable temperatures, often at cooler periods in extreme heat.
Nectar, honeydew and arthropod material.
Underground colony with specialised food-storage workers.
What makes this species remarkable?
A replete’s abdomen expands until the membranes between its plates are stretched into a translucent globe, storing many times the liquid volume of an ordinary worker.
The food bank is alive and reversible: nestmates stimulate a replete to regurgitate droplets, converting stored nectar back into immediately shareable colony fuel.
The species belongs to a honey-ant lineage whose repletes have long been harvested as food by Indigenous peoples — one of the clearest examples of humans eating an insect’s stored crop rather than the insect itself.
Sources and scientific references
More photographs
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