Kenya’s queen ants worth $220 each fuel global wildlife black market

Wycliffe Muia, NairobiSunday March 29, 2026

Giant African harvester ants – seen here in Kenya – have become highly sought after by hobby collectors across the world

Right now, the ants are taking flight in Kenya.

In the rainy season, clouds of them rise from thousands of anthills around Gilgil, a quiet farming town in Kenya’s Rift Valley that has unexpectedly become the hub of a lucrative illegal trade.

The mating ritual sends winged males out of the nest to fertilise queens, which also take to the air at this time. That creates an opportunity for collectors and smugglers, who chase down queen ants for a booming global black market feeding the craze for keeping ants in clear enclosures and watching them build colonies.

The most coveted insects are the giant African harvester ant queens, which are large and red. On the black market, typically run online, a single queen can sell for as much as £170 ($220).

One fertilised queen can establish an entire colony and live for decades, and because scanners do not usually pick up organic material, the insects can be sent by post with little trouble.

“At first, I did not even know it was illegal,” a man, who asked not to be named, told the BBC of the time he worked as a broker connecting overseas buyers with local collection networks.

Also known as Messor cephalotes, the species is native to East Africa and prized by ant enthusiasts for its distinctive seed-gathering habits.

“A friend told me a foreigner was paying good money for queen ants – the big red ones which are easily seen around here,” the former broker said.

“You look for the mounds near open fields, usually early morning before the heat. The foreigners never came to the fields themselves – they would wait in town, in a guest house or a car, and we would bring the ants to them packed in small tubes or syringes they supplied us with.”

The true scale of the trade in Kenya came into view last year, when 5,000 giant harvester ant queens – mostly gathered around Gilgil – were discovered alive at a guest house in Naivasha, a lakeside town nearby that is popular with tourists.

According to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), the suspects – from Belgium, Vietnam and Kenya – had packed the ants into test tubes and syringes with moist cotton wool, allowing each one to survive for up to two months.

The intention was to ship them to Europe and Asia for sale.

Scientists and authorities say the ant trade has caught them off guard.

Kenya is more familiar with high-profile wildlife crime involving elephant tusks and rhino horns.

UK-based retailer Ants R Us calls the giant African harvester ant “many people’s dream species” – although the queens are currently out of stock, with the company saying it is extremely difficult to source them.

“Even I, as an entomologist, have been surprised at the extent of the apparent trade,” Dino Martins, a biologist in Kenya, where about 600 ant species are found, told the BBC.

Still, he understands the appeal of East Africa’s harvester ants, which are founded by a “foundress queen” that can grow to 25mm (0.98 inches) and continues producing eggs for life.

“They are one of the most enigmatic species of ants – they form large colonies, engage in interesting behaviours and are easy to keep. They are not aggressive.”

He says the queens mate with several males during the swarming period.

“Then that is it for the males – their job is done… most are eaten by predators or die,” the entomologist says, before explaining that the queen then crawls off, digs a small burrow and starts laying eggs to build her colony.

The workers and soldier ants that protect the nest are all female, and their numbers can eventually run into the hundreds of thousands.

“Nests can live for over 50 years, perhaps even up to 70 years. I personally know of nests near Nairobi that are at least 40 years old as I’ve been visiting them for that long,” said Martins.

That also means the queens can live for the same span – because once she dies, the colony falls apart and any surviving workers search for another nest.

Kenyans who have dealt with ants raiding crops or invading homes know this well. To eliminate a colony, someone is sent to find the queen, often buried deep inside one of the tunnels or chambers of an anthill.

The former broker said ants could also be collected by lightly disturbing the mound and gathering them as they rushed out.

“It was only when I saw the arrests on the news that I realised what I had been part of – and I immediately quit,” he said.

Those arrested were convicted of biopiracy and told to pay fines or serve 12 months in jail. They chose to pay the $7,700 fee, and the foreign nationals left Kenya.

Two weeks ago, a Chinese national – believed to be the alleged mastermind behind last year’s ring and said to have escaped using another passport – was arrested at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) with another 2,000 queen ants packed in test tubes and tissue rolls.

For Zhengyang Wang, a member of the research team that published a 2023 report on the ant trade in China, the development is alarming and could “wreak havoc” with local ecosystems.

“Initially, we were very excited when we learnt that many people have taken up keeping ants,” Wang, assistant professor at Sichuan University, told the BBC.

“A colony of pet ants are often kept in a formicarium, which is basically a transparent plastic box so that keepers can observe colonies at work, digging tunnels, collecting food, and guarding their queen. I’d say it’s quite charming and… can be a good way of educating people about insects and their behaviour.

“But then we realised, wait, isn’t keeping invasive species incredibly dangerous?”

By monitoring online sales of more than 58,000 colonies over six months in China, the researchers found that more than a quarter of the species traded were not native to China – even though importing them is illegal.

“If the trade volume of invasive ants continues to grow, it’s only a matter of time before a few escape from their formicaria and become established in the wild,” said Wang.

The study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, warned of the possible impact of giant African harvester ants, one of the most traded species in China. “For example, Messor cephalotes, an East African native, is among the largest seed harvesters in the world and could potentially disrupt predominantly grain-based agriculture in south-eastern China.”

The environmental risks are also troubling in Kenya.

“Harvester ants are both keystone species and ecosystem engineers. They harvest seeds of grasses, and other plants and in so doing also help to disperse the seeds,” said Martins, adding that the insects “create a more healthy and dynamic grassland”.

Mukonyi Watai, a senior scientist at Kenya’s Wildlife Research and Training Institute, shares that concern.

“Unsustainable harvesting – particularly the removal of queen ants – can lead to colony collapse, disrupting ecosystems and threatening biodiversity,” he told the BBC.

Collecting ants legally in Kenya is possible – in line with various international treaties – but only with a special permit, and the buyer would have to sign a benefit-sharing agreement with the local community involved to divide any profits.

However, according to the KWS, no such applications have been made so far. The paperwork would also need to specify how many ants are being collected and where they are going.

Some conservationists are now pushing for stronger trade protections for all ant species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), the global wildlife trade treaty.

“The reality is that no ant species is currently listed under Cites,” Sérgio Henriques, a researcher into the global ant trade, told the BBC.

“Without international treaties monitoring these movements, the scale of the trade remains largely invisible to policy makers and the global community,” he said.

For the KWS, though, the immediate challenge is more practical: how to monitor and curb “under-reported” insect trafficking. The agency says better surveillance equipment at airports and other border points would be a good place to start.

Martins agrees: “It is likely only a fraction of the actual ants being traded that are being detected, so one can only guess at the scale for now.”

Journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo says Kenya may be missing out on a major source of global revenue.

“The ants are not finite items like gold or diamonds. They are biological assets that can be bred and farmed, and their production can be scaled up to thousand a day. Yet we treat them like stolen artefacts,” he recently wrote in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.

In fact, Kenya’s cabinet approved policy guidelines last year aimed at commercialising the wildlife economy, including the ant trade.

“The guidelines seek to promote sustainable use trade of wild species such as ants to generate jobs, wealth and community livelihoods across all the counties,” said Watai.

With the right oversight, future farmers around Gilgil could one day have special formicaria on their land, adding lucrative queen ants to fields and orchards already producing vegetables and fruits.

But the argument over the risks of exporting ants to hobby collectors around the world is far from settled.