Red Wood Ant (Heller)

Walkaround of the red wood ant, Formica rufa Linnaeus, 1761, No. 79400 by the French company Heller (2000). This is the fourth and final insect figure in their set of four. It was the one I was most excited to get, and finally did! While ant figures are commonly made in 'chinabug' bin sets, having figures marketed at the species level is actually quite rare considering. This species is the classic 'red ant' of Europe. This species, as presently delineated, does not occur in North America, but there are about 25 species in the rufa-complex that do.

On ATF and STS you can see other walkarounds of the Coccinella septempunctata and Oryctes nasicornis. Sometimes the four figures (there is a Lucanus cervus as well that I did not do a walkaround for) are marketed together as 'Forest Monsters' collection.

Like all Heller model kits, assembly is required. This model comes in 13 pieces (top, bottom, mandibles, 2 eyes, 2 antennae, 6 legs) in a matte black. I first assembled the body and mandibles and painted the body with a red-brown-yellow mix (in the final product it dried a little more brown than I would have liked, but I am still happy with it). I then added the antennae (painted first) and legs, sealing everything with superglue. They recommended painting the black parts black, but the base color is adequate to I left it as is. As usual, I coated the final product with a satin varnish.

The final figure is 110 mm long, making it roughly 16:1 for an average-sized worker (normal legnth 4.5-9.0 mm).

On to the pics:















And the final product:





And with the entire 'Forest Monsters' collection:

Nice ant figurine :)

You are completely right, finding a figure of an ant being marketed over the family level is almost a miracle. Most ant figures are quite generic and companies are clearly more interested in showing their casts or specialized members of a colony. A proof of it is that on TAI we still have all ants grouped in the same page. I have to check your topics to see which species of ants were already released to start dividing it in narrower taxa levels. Thanks for this walk around and you did a good job with the figure.

This is great! How awesome you have this model kit still in box! Thanks for sharing, it's really nice

Roger is right: ants are most often represented as generic ants. It is even the case when it comes to enthomology books. I have a research about insects at home, on which I work from time to time. Well, believe it or not, if specialized references on lepidopteres are abundant, very few informations are spread about the ants. So, I had to put only one page about ants, because I cannot even identify the exact species of the one dried specimen (picked up already dead, like all my insects), I have, even though it is in perfect condition. So, nothing is written yet on my ant page. However,all my lepidoptere spicimens are identified.

I love this model

Such a great job you did, assembling and painting ! I could never do anything like that

Funny you show this this insect, which is very common everywhere here, but does not live in America.
This summer my cousin from Michigan was here, and when we took a walk in the forest, he was completely in awe over the huge anthills everywhere !
At long last something in Denmark, which is bigger than in USA
Another strange coincidence - my cousin owns a compagny called Heller., like the Frencht one which made this model ..

Amazing model, Big but of course a species level ant model needs to be big... Or Kaiyodo.