small longer living insects besides spiders

Ok I have an ant colony and I love it but my worker ants have lived about 6 months and my colony just died. I had them in a mason jar I made i fixed up so id like to keep something in there that might live longer any suggestions will be appreciated

I heard termites can live for a very long time. At least their queen that is.
The problem with insects is, most of them do not live very long. Typically one life cycle of most insects are within one year. What you need isn't an extremely long lived insect species, you should be looking at how to sustain your colony. Getting a queen ant might be a start in my opinion lol.

By the way, spiders aren't exactly insects.

Yeah I know a lot of people mix the arachnid group with insects a lot tho so I figured id put spiders in there. And my problem is I want an insect but its winter and ants are hibernating for the most part so no queens is there any good suggestions of insects that I might keep during the winter

(12-11-2012, 01:31 PM)jared185 Wrote: Yeah I know a lot of people mix the arachnid group with insects a lot tho so I figured id put spiders in there. And my problem is I want an insect but its winter and ants are hibernating for the most part so no queens is there any good suggestions of insects that I might keep during the winter

Ants will stay active if the temperature is warm enough. If you have heat in your room all the time, it shouldn't be a problem.

In my case, I always turn up the heat to keep my room temperature at 73~74F throughout the entire winter. Not that I want to keep ants, but it is a good temperature to keep most of the pets and myself.