Sunday, September 21, 2025

The pop singer who built a million-dollar ant empire

How one YouTuber took ant-keeping mainstream — and built a million-dollar company

BY KATHERINE LAIDLAW

One night, Mikey Bustos looked around a room he kept filled with ants in his home in Manila. “I have,” he announced, “a very serious problem.”

His colony of fire ants was plotting an escape.

Bustos is an antkeeper who, for the last 20 years, has developed a collection of millions of creatures. He chronicles the adventures (and misadventures) of the hobby on YouTube, at AntsCanada, where he’s amassed a following of nearly 7m and become the world’s most prominent antfluencer.

When he realized his fire ants were plotting, for example, 47m people tuned in to see the outcome.

“When these girls want to escape, I just feed them more cockroaches,” he narrates, wryly. You can imagine what happens next.

Bustos has done more for the hobby of ant-keeping in the last 15 years than anyone else. And he’s become the leader of one of the world’s biggest ant supply stores in the process.

Voice of an angel

Mikey Bustos emerged on the public stage as a singer, not an antkeeper. At 21, he tried out for Canadian Idol, a Canadian spinoff of the American original. The judges liked him, and so did the audience: he’d go on to place 8th in the singing competition. A magazine wrote that he had the voice of an angel.

Mikey Bustos’s hobby became his main hustle when his ants channel took off. (Photo by Morgan Lieberman/FilmMagic)

It was 2003, and the creator economy wasn’t just in its infancy — it was a figment of someone’s imagination.

Bustos toured across Canada, the US, and the Philippines, opening for the Pussycat Dolls and Christina Aguilera. He released an album, and some of his singles charted, but he never really hit it big.

Behind the scenes, Bustos had always been fascinated by ants: as a five-year-old, he’d arrive at family parties eager to turn over stones and examine the creatures living underneath them. By fourth grade, he’d created an insect zoo in his parents’ basement to entertain the neighbourhood kids.

A National Geographic article inspired him to start ant-keeping, and in 2010, he began posting videos of his homemade farms to YouTube.

“Of course my parents thought it was weird,” he told his audience in one video, laughing. He was almost 30 years old and still playing with bugs.

The Hustle

He had YouTube channels for his singing and comedy sketches, and decided to create one for ants, too. AntsCanada was born.

When he hit 100 subscribers, he thought he might be onto something. Viewers began to ask him to make ant farms, and he’d tool around in his parents’ Toronto basement, ship them off, and charge ~$50.

A year later, one of his comedy videos went viral and he moved to Manila to focus on a career in entertainment. He struggled to keep AntsCanada going — products were discontinued, customers were frustrated, and he no longer had his parents’ basement in which to create formicaria (or ant homes). He shut the company down.

Uncle Milton’s “antariums”

The first formicarium, or ant farm, was patented by Frank Austen, a Dartmouth College professor, in 1931.

Twenty-five years later, in 1956, California businessman Milton Levine watched an army of ants during a Fourth of July picnic. He turned to his brother-in-law, telling him they should make an “antarium.” As a child, he loved collecting ants in jars. As an adult, he’d help countless children do the same in what would become Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Now considered the godfather of antkeeping, Levine’s invention brought the hobby to the masses. According to the New York Times, Uncle Milton’s has sold more than 20m ant farms.

Steven Levine, former president of Uncle Milton Industries, Inc., poses with his children and a variety of ant farms. (Photo by Ricardo Dearatanha/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Today, the company continues to sell its at-home ant kits but largely wholesale, leaving a gap in the market that companies like AntsCanada are trying to fill.

Two years after he shut it down, Bustos started AntsCanada again, with a renewed focus on educational videos. Ants in the Philippines don’t hibernate, which meant his new home was fertile ground for making videos year-round.

As his channel grew, his business did too. AntsCanada designed and tested ant farms and opened manufacturing outposts in Beijing and Salt Lake City. Bustos didn’t respond to The Hustle’s request for comment, but the company says it has sold hundreds of thousands of ant farms to prospective keepers around the world.

Zachary Liu is taking it one step further, developing a prototype for a formicarium (ant colony included) for more serious enthusiasts.

Liu is the founder and owner of Canada Ant Colony, another supply store and education portal for ant aficionados.

For any ant merchant, to stay competitive in the market means collecting queen ants with which to build colonies. And the collection window is narrow: queens reveal themselves during mating flights, which happen only for a couple of hours once every year or two. (Queens can sell for as low as a few dollars or as high as $500, depending on the species.)

The Hustle

“A lot of the competitive advantage is being able to predict those flights consistently,” Liu says. When he does, he transmits the intel to a network of suppliers all across North America who are waiting for the call.

In the six years Liu has been in business, he’s seen the hobby of ant-keeping take off, reaching what he calls a saturation point. The next step, he says, is educating the masses, bringing the hobby beyond people already keeping unconventional pets like reptiles and into the mainstream.

“I think ant-keeping is really a business of information,” Liu says. “The biggest barrier to entry is just figuring out how to do it.”

Thomas Doggett-Hill, owner of the UK’s Ants on a Rock shop, says the hobby has grown from virtually nonexistent 20 years ago to the bustling ecosystem it is today.

“It’s increasing daily,” he says. “AntsCanada does a massive job of bringing people into the hobby.”

For him, the shop itself is just a slice of his overall revenue — and passion. Doggett-Hill is autistic, and sees many kids today getting into ant-keeping for many of the reasons he first did: watching them organize helped him learn more about humans, too.

“I don’t want to change the world, but I want people to take more notice,” he says. “Just to share what I’m doing and get the kids smiling.”

Last weekend, Ants on a Rock hosted Bustos at a meet-and-greet, and 1k ant-keepers, young and old, turned out to see him.

GenZ spending

We’re spending more and more on our pets. The pandemic, which levelled many other industries, prompted exponential growth in pets, ant-keeping included.

A recent report from NielsenIQ said online pet spending is up 44% in the US, to $37.8B, and highlighted Gen Z as the biggest potential growth area when it comes to furry (or crawling) companions. Last year, Fortune Business Insights noted that Gen Z gets most of their pet marketing from, you guessed it, YouTube.

And, just like human tech, pet tech is getting an upgrade. A recent industry conference discussed products like:

• feeders that scan microchips before dispensing food
• air-conditioned crates
• apps that suggest home cooking based on a pet’s dietary needs and activity levels

For a company like AntsCanada, which sells starter kits for $100 and more elaborate set-ups for $180, news that e-commerce spending on pets continues to rise means there’s likely still room to grow.

Playing God

Bustos’s entertainment background shines through in his videos. He’s a natural storyteller, likening ants to real-life Pokémon and pausing for dramatic effect before delivering his colonies a cockroach Christmas tree or adding a new monster python into his vivarium to watch chaos ensue.

Winged carpenter ants prepare for their annual nuptial flight this year. (Photo by Soumyabrata Roy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

His channel’s direction has courted controversy in recent years. Liu says many serious antkeepers don’t follow Bustos the way they once did.

Commenters say he’s courting clicks, putting views above ants as he adds baby crocodiles, microsquirrels and snakes to the rainforest ecosystems he keeps in his home, his back muscles flexing in the fluorescent light as he stage-directs creatures to fight each other for the camera. Still, others say they wake up every Sunday morning, curl up in bed with their kids, and watch the new AntsCanada drop together.

Bustos, for his part, marches on.

He’s been asked many times about his hobby turned passion turned business — why ants?

For him and other antkeepers, it's the similarities to humans that propel them. In a TED Talk, Bustos explained how keeping an ant colony is like having a little city at your fingertips.

“Why [do] we ant-keepers love keeping ants so much? It’s because we get to play god,” he says.

“It’s a gods’ eye view of the miracle of nature.”

In another video, he muses about the ways ant colonies mirror starting a business.

“It starts small,” he tells his viewers. “It grows and grows over time until you have millions.”

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