Ants Go Marching--Again : Hobbies: Culver City firm’s ant farm makes Soviets bug-eyed. In this country, it’s a second-generation hit.

Little ants are a big deal.

Uncle Milton Industries’ Ant Farm of Culver City is 34 years old this month, but the slender, clear-plastic terrarium in which ants tunnel under a barn and windmill is making a comeback and breaking new ground.

The ants and their farms were introduced last November to the Soviet Union at the U.S. Consumer Goods Exhibition in Moscow along with vinyl flooring, California wines, cosmetics, calculators, cooking utensils, water filter systems, cigars and 100 other products.

But according to Jolana Jaklovsky, an organizer of the show, the ants had a special appeal. She said officials from government offices, factories and cooperatives invited to the exhibit remarked that the Ant Farm was a “sophisticated toy and also very smart” as well as “very clean, very well designed.”

‘They were very excited with the idea,” said Jaklovsky, vice president of International Marketing Services Inc., based in Massachusetts. “They were amazed that somebody would think (of it).”

And, she noted, “you can play with this toy (anywhere), because every country has ants.” (The ants in the exhibition, in fact, were not Americans but Muscovites because of restrictions on shipping live animals, Jaklovsky said).

But if the real test of how well a toy will do is the reaction of children, the ant farms should sell like hot cakes if they ever become available in the Soviet Union. Children from an orphanage were invited to the show to ogle the toys, including tea sets, skateboards, a Fisher-Price Little People School and a Minnie Mouse Beauty Set. The Ant Farm was one of their favorites, Jaklovsky said.

“They love to watch all this crawling, all this moving. . . . They were screaming to see these working ants.”

Most of the toys were donated to the children, and at last report the ants were happily burrowing in their new digs at the orphanage.

But despite their splashy debut and the fact that, as Uncle Milton President Steven Levine wrote in an introductory letter to the Soviets, the farms are a “fascinating way to demonstrate teamwork and perseverance to children,” it may be some time before Ant Farms reach store shelves in the U.S.S.R.

Levine had wanted to barter ant farms for a particular handmade Soviet wooden doll, which he had hoped to sell here for under $10. But hefty tariffs shot the price of the dolls too high, stymieing the deal, Levine said.

Levine hasn’t given up hope, though, and says the arrangement will work if President George Bush grants trade privileges to the U.S.S.R. “We’re waiting for (most) favored nation status,” he said, which would lower tariffs on Soviet goods shipped to America.

The Soviet Union isn’t the only place where the Ant Farm has made furrows. The export version, which comes with an ant catcher, has sold in Canada and Australia for several years and this year began selling at Toys-R-Us stores in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, Levine said. Uncle Milton is pitching it to Hungary, Poland, Western Europe, Brazil and New Zealand.

All this has come as a pleasant surprise to the Culver City company. “We thought Americans were the only ones crazy enough to put ants in their living room and watch them,” Levine said.

Living rooms aren’t the only place Americans are putting them these days. In May, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History installed a 2-by-3-foot farm, made by Uncle Milton with the firm’s trademark bright-green pastoral scene. An even larger, permanent farm will be installed when the Ralph M. Parsons Insect Zoo opens in a wing of the museum in 1992, said Art Evans, director of the zoo. Also in the insect zoo will be honey bee and termite colonies and exhibits on aquatic insects, musical insects, and insects as inspirations in music, poetry and art, Evans said.

For now, the 500 harvester ants on the museum farm vie for children’s attention with sterile Medflies, glorious scarab beetles (emerald green with silver pinstripes), a Mexican red-kneed tarantula that can be petted, and others. But their antics set them apart.

“Most of the things are feeding or just sitting in the tank” and get active only at night, Evans said. The Ant Farm “is one of the few things we have where the (insects) are working on (something) all the time. What (the ants) lack in size, they make up in number and ambition.”

Uncle Milton also has plans to install another huge farm at the Kidspace children’s museum in Pasadena to replace an ant community that “dropped dead six months ago,” said Kidspace Executive Director Elaine Fleming. The old colony’s demise probably began with cave-ins during the 1987 Whittier earthquake, she said, and “we finally gave up on it.”

The new ant farm, which should be completed by the end of the summer, will be a vast improvement over the old set-up, in which the ants could be seen only if they forayed above ground, Fleming said. Unable to glimpse the ants’ subterranean feats, she said, “everybody always asked us, ‘Can’t you redesign it so it looks like Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm?’ ”

“Once we get all the bugs out,” Levine said with a grin, the company may try hawking the gigantic farms “to museums, schools, libraries, eccentric people.”

All this was hardly anticipated by Levine’s father, the Uncle Milton, who was a mail-order novelty-toys entrepreneur. None of Milton Levine’s other brainchildren have lasted so long, Steven Levine said. That includes the miniature shrunken head to hang from rear-view mirrors, the Sea Horse Corral, the bonsai tree kit. And the Spud Gun--”a real piece of American kitsch,” the younger Levine says--which fired potato pellets.

Milton Levine got the idea for the ant farms when he watched the little creatures invade a Fourth of July picnic in 1956, triggering memories of collecting ants as a child, tossing them into a Mason jar and watching them excavate. Now, 12 million farms and more than 360 million ants later, his invention has outlived its spinoff Ant Farm Game, six presidencies, Pet Rocks, Cabbage Patch dolls and Teddy Ruxpin.

The farm has changed a little. There’s a different kind of sand that seems to increase the ants’ longevity to about eight months, Steven Levine said, compared with up to a year in the wild. With the old sand, the ants lived about three months. And as of this year, the boxes no longer tout the product as “NEW!” The cover now features a snazzier ant wearing a straw hat and overalls, as well as modernized, pug-nosed kids.

Uncle Milton Industries has remained pretty much the same, too, gliding from one generation to the next as an all-in-the-family operation. Milton Levine, 76, turned over the reins to his son last year but still drops by the office a few times a week. The company employs two families to gather ants in the desert, and the chief digger is a woman whose father also dug for Uncle Milton.

But there seems to be a resurgence in interest in the farms. Steven Levine expects sales this year to top 500,000, more than in any year since the farm first came out. In its first two years, “it was a fad like the Hula Hoop” and annual sales were about 2 million, Levine said.

On a recent day, plastic vials holding 30 ants each were being mailed from the Culver City warehouse to such far-flung places as Venice, Fla., Monmouth, Ore., Stamford, Conn., Milan, Pa., and San Jose. Evans, of the Natural History Museum, speculates that baby boomers and flower children who grew up on ant farms are buying them for their youngsters.

With today’s high-tech generation, “we’re definitely having to compete with MTV and some of the computer games,” Evans said. But the Ant Farm has its own quiet virtues. “It’s something that the kids can get involved with. They don’t need a lot of expensive equipment; they needn’t travel very far,” Evans said. “They only need a sharp eye and inquisitive mind.”