Still on the Farm, 200 Million Ants Later By RUSSELL MILLER , New York Times 20xii91 [Scanned. And you know what that means!] IT is a timeless pastoral silhouette: the green plastic barn and windmill, the meandering path to the green plastic farmhouse, all encompassed by the sturdy "escape-proof" green plastic frame. The last three decades have seen other farms swallowed by shopping malls and condo tracts, but time has not ravaged the rhythms of life at Uncle Milton's Ant Farm. Ant farms still come in sturdy yellow boxes. You can still populate them with ants you've found, but most people still mail "stock certificates" back to Uncle Milton Industries Inc. for vials of Pogonomyrmex californicus - red ants from California. A couple of weeks later, they shake the vials into the farm and the six-legged homesteaders tumble into their new spread. Soon, the still life becomes a mad microcosm. Sometimes it sleeps. Sometimes it seethes. The ants, needless to say, ignore the backdrop. Like the bottled city Superman used to keep in his Fortress of Solitude, an ant farm is part plaything, part glorious brutal truth. You have to be responsible - a few drops of water, a few grains of Uncle Milton's ant food, maybe a speck of apple. For your efforts you wake to find heaps of sand raised or razed, wiggly tunnels closed or opened overnight. You gaze, bewildered, at sudden, apparently random bursts of antly activity. You watch, helpless, as the colony diminishes, survivors hauling the dead to the surface. Within months, or some- times weeks, the more-or-less natural cycle winds down. The graveyards are full. The show ends. In the 1960's, an ant farm was as important a fixture of middle-class childhood as Fizzies or comic-book ads offering 100 Revolutionary War soldiers for a dollar. The farms weren't as slick or as space-age as fake radios that turned into spy guns, but they were real - continually changing, a tad scary and, in the spirit of the cold war, contained. They still are. Uncle Milton Industries sells about $2 million worth a year - half a million units last Christmas alone. And it's not just boys and girls. Ant farms, like other relics of the Kennedy era, have won adult attention. Danielle Steel characters chat about them in "Daddy." The art-demon mom in "Beetlejuice" describes her country home as "a giant ant farm." "The Whole Pop Catalogue" (Avon Books; 1991) devotes four pages to ant farms. In their "Encyclopedia of Bad Taste," Jane and Michael Stern repeat a rumor about ants crawling out of a sandwich, inspiring Milton Levine to invent his Ant Farm. Sitting in the Culver City, Calif., offices of Uncle Milton Industries, Mr. Levine, an avuncular, white-mustached gentleman of 78 years, recalled a less gruesome scene. He was 42 at the time, a fairly successful mail-order merchant -the very one, he said, who sold "a hundred toy soldiers for a buck." . "I had 35 girls opening mail," he said. "Sat there like a rooster." On July 4, 1956, poolside at his sister , s house in the San Fernando Valley, Mr. Levine noticed a mound of ants. Children like ants, he thought. He himself had played with ants as a boy back in Pittsburgh. Why not a toy formicarium? "We got the idea of the farm from a coloring book," he said. "I think that helped make the item." The item took off. From baby-boom rec rooms it moved to television and movie sets. Science museums commissioned oversize ant farm displays. Mr. Levine recalled building a 12-foot Plexiglas-walled aAt [ant] farm for the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, and a walk-throdgh version for the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle. In 1968, ant farms entered the avant-garde when a design group devoted to "underground architecture" borrowed the name. "It was a household word," said Doug Michels, a Washington architect and one of Ant Farm's founders. Not only did the designers frame photos of their projects in the bottom halves of toy ant farms, the toy also inspired the group's best known work, a field of half-buried Cadillacs outside Amarillo, Tex. "It's no coincidence," Mr. Michels said, "that Cadillac Ranch is halfway underground." For Cadillac Ranch's 20th anniversary, in 1994, Mr. Michels wants to develop a toy ant farm with a row of tiny plastic Cadillacs inside. Steven Levine, Milton's son, now head of Uncle Milton Industries, is dubious. It wouldn't be the first variant, though. In 1979 Uncle Milton introduced Executive Antropolis, a mahogany Ant Farm-cum-desk set with a black and gold skyline of Manhattan. In the 1980's, the Sharper Image catalogue offered grown-up boys and girls deluxe ant farms with bulletproof polycarbonate sides. Otherwise, after 13 million farms and 200 million ants, the design is essentially unchanged. There are still two sizes: regular, 6 by 9 inches, and the swimming-pool-embossed giant, 10 by 15 inches. Six years ago, the Levines added side ports to the larger model and began including ???? to connect a modular Ant Farm-Village. The packaging has been freshened a bit. Some of the ants on the box now wear "gimme" caps instead of silk toppers, and the ribbon on the giant box went from black to blue. Regular Ant Farms still come with Milton Levine's Ant Watchers' Manual, and giants with his slightly longer Ant Watcher's Handbook, citing Pliny and the World Book Encyclopedia ("famous," the handbook says, "for its excellent chapter on ants") as witnesses to the -intelligent, industrious, democratic, athletic and sani- tary virtues of ants. The pamphlets pass along Uncle Milton's prescription for healthy ants that work hard when the sun shines and hold little socials after dark: Treat the colony gently and don't overfeed. It's anthropomorphic, the Levines grant, but the basic facts are right. Entomologists might disagree. E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, an authority on ants, said ant farms were too cute by far. "But the main problem," he said, "is that they lack a queen. Without the queen, who is the mother of the colony, the colony quickly becomes dysfunctional." Workers turn listless; their work. lacks organization. The Ant Watchers' Handbook notwithstanding, what looks like ant depression to the naked eye might be -- ant depression. Steven Levine defers to the expert. "But we've been making this for 35 years, and they do accomplish digging tunnels and they do store their food and everything else," he said. State regulations, he said, prevent the company from shipping queens. Milton Levine acknowledges that he is no scientist. But he is an expert of sorts. "Most novelties, if they last one season it's a lot," he mused. "if they last two seasons, it's a phenomenon to last 35 years is unheard of." -------------------- From Voyeur To Head Ant IT was perhaps inevitable that someone invent Simant, an ant colony toy for the Nintendo generation. Prepared by a company called Maxis for I.B.M. and Macintosh personal computers, this "life simulation software game" allows people to play ant: looking up tunnels, skittering across lawns, dodging spiders, bug spray and human feet. Unimpeded by real-life import regulations, each Si- mant colony has a queen, each reproduces and each can fight. The electronic ants can even escape to infest the electronic house. An illustrated guide to ant science waits on-line. You need it here, because, as the manual explains, "you are the intelligence" of the colony. While Maxis has tied Simant's introduction to the 35th anniversary of tile "live Ant Farm," there is no comparison. There is no barn in Simant. There are no ever-growing funerary mounds. There is no compassion. "When an ant dies," the manual remarks, "it's no big deal." Worse, with Simant there's no doing what ant farm devotees love best: to sit, and sit, and sit, and watch a world rise and decay. For information, call (510) 254-9700. -- donald j haarmann - independently dubious