The insect that farms aphids for their sugary honeydew is the ant.
This relationship is a well-known example of mutualism. Aphids feed on plant sap and excrete honeydew, a sweet liquid that ants collect. In return, ants protect aphids from predators and parasites, sometimes moving them to better feeding sites or tending them directly with their antennae, a behavior often compared with milking.
The arrangement can be highly organized. Some ants gather aphid eggs and store them inside their nests through winter. When spring arrives, they carry the newly hatched aphids back to plants. The European yellow meadow ant, Lasius flavus, can maintain large underground herds of root-feeding aphids, and a queen leaving to establish a new colony may take an aphid egg with her.
“Farming” does not mean ants domesticated aphids in the human sense, and not every ant species does it. The relationship can also alter aphid behavior: attended aphids tend to produce smaller, more concentrated drops of honeydew. Some bees collect aphid honeydew too, but ants are the classic insect farmers in this quiz.