Before leaving the government during the layoffs this year, Rosario-Lebrón says he had to lobby hard for any attention to be paid to the ant smuggling issue, noting that he pushed to “make a legal route so that we could have the kids find legal queens to buy online, and we started working really hard to permit people.” Queen ants, the reproductive females that lay all the eggs, are necessary for any colony’s survival but are especially risky to transport, as letting an invasive queen loose in a new area means that it could establish a colony and displace native ants.

And when they get loose and start causing problems to local ecosystems, it's going to cause way more money loss than paying some people to regulate them. I don't know if honeypot ants in florida will cause the same problems as ash borers or lanternflies, but that's not a gamble i want to take.