‘People would ask: “If you’re in the ant business, where’s the ‘uncle? ‘ “ So I used the obvious name.’--MILTON LEVINE : This Uncle Is an Ant Tycoon

Ants share many qualities possessed by the most admirable of human beings. Ants are loyal, industrious, cooperative and clean.

Some ants are smart and are natural leaders. Others are not so smart and need to be told by the bosses what to do. When one of the dummies wanders off on his own, for instance, a leader raps him on the head with his feelers and orders him back in line.

Milton Levine, who is to ant-watching what Henry Ford was to the auto industry, knows all about the forgoing and more:

For all the qualities they share with human beings, however, ants have a very eccentric sex life. In fact, the vast majority have none at all. One reason for this is that male ants are almost non-existent and most of the females cannot reproduce.

Males Called ‘Princes’

The rare males are called “princes.” The females able to reproduce are queens and sometimes grow to be 10 times the size of other ants. When the mating urge comes, Levine said, something pretty stupendous happens--by human standards.

“Both the queen and the prince have wings,” Levine said. “They fly 100 feet straight up in the air and mate.”

After the quick tryst, several things happen, all bad in the case of the male.

“His wings fall off and he drops dead,” Levine said. “The female also sheds her wings and falls to the ground. Then she begins laying eggs almost immediately. For possibly as along as the next 15 years after that single mating, she lays eggs almost continuously. Hundreds of thousands of them. The survivors become her colony.”

Levine, 72, and best known as Uncle Milton to friends, employees and followers, knows a lot about ants. He concedes, however, that he doesn’t know as much about them as professional and even other amateur myrmecologists, people devoted to the scientific study of ants. But no one has made as much money from ants as has Uncle Milton.

Levine invented the Ant Farm, both a toy and a child’s learning device sold throughout the world and a product of such enduring popularity that it has made him a wealthy man.

After more than 30 years as an ant tycoon, he continues to preside as chairman of Uncle Milton Industries Inc. on West Jefferson Boulevard in Culver City, although his son, Steven, 33, runs the day-to-day operations.

He estimates that the company, which has a monoply in the ant farm business, has sold more than 7 million ant farms worldwide.

It was exactly three decades ago this month that Levine conceived of the idea that soon became Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Letters From Parents

Not a day goes by, he said, that he doesn’t get a letter from a parent or even a grandparent describing the joy in owning a farm as a child and reporting that they had purchased one for a child or grandchild.

To understand how Levine, a man possessed of bountiful good humor, most of it wry, became Uncle Milton, ant farm mogul, one must go back to Pittsburgh, his birthplace, where he grew up and first went into business. And it was from there that he marched off to World War II and the Allied invasion of France, where he met his wife, Mauricette, at a synagogue in Cherbourg after the city’s liberation.

After the war, he started a mail-order toy business in Pittsburgh, selling such items as lead soldiers through comic book ads. But he had visited Southern California during military training and, like so many GIs, “fell in love with it.” In 1952, he moved to Los Angeles.

“I decided if the business was to be a success, I needed a product, a unique product,” Levine recalled. “When I was a kid, we used to go to my uncle’s farm. . . . There were insects all over the place. We used to put sand or dirt in a Mason jar and throw in some ants and watch them go to work.

“Well, on July 4, 1956, I went to a picnic at my sister’s place in the Valley. And you know what happens at a picnic? Ants. And I hit on the idea . . . I put a two-inch ad in The Times’ old Home magazine. . . . It read something like: ‘Watch the ants dig tunnels and build bridges.’ I got so many orders I couldn’t believe it.”

The first farms sold for $1.98. They consisted of two sheets of transparent plastic held in a solid-colored plastic frame. A plastic farm scene--barn, silo, windmill, farmhouse--and a layer of sand.

The original farms were six inches by nine inches and housed 25 to 30 ants, just as they do today. Later, Levine came up with the Giant Ant Farm, a 10-inch-by-15-inch case that house 45 to 50 inhabitants. Today, the regular farm sells for about $8; the giant, about $18.

‘Used Obvious Name’

Early on, Levine took a lot of ribbing. People would ask: “If you’re in the ant business, where’s the ‘uncle? ‘ “

“So I used the obvious name” and called the product Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

The ants don’t come with the farm, because the insects won’t survive on a store’s shelf. Instead, the buyer receives a coupon redeemable by mailing it to Uncle Milton.

Levine does not use just any kind of ant--there are more than 6,000 varieties--to stock his farms. He settled on the harvester ant, a desert ant that has the scientific name of pogonomyrmex Californicus , but which is nicknamed “pogy,” as the ideal occupant.

“Pogies are one of the few varieties that will dig in the daylight, most others only dig in the darkness,” he said.

Levine sends only worker ants, whose survival rate in the mail is exceptional. Well-cared-for ants can live as long as a year. The great killer is overfeeding. Said Levine: “People forget how tiny ants are.”