While recruitment to known food sources by ants has been studied extensively, it is not as clear how individuals discover new food sources. Moreover, the search strategies used by ants lacking mass recruitment are not well known. We approach these questions by characterizing the foraging behavior of Temnothorax rugatulus ants. Their small colony size allows the observation of the foraging activity of the entire colony as well as each individual. In this study, T. rugatulus colonies were attached to uniform foraging arenas that did not provide any food sources. We compared the search areas between foragers of the same colony and within individuals on different days. We found that the search path of T. rugatulus foragers can be described as a random walk, i.e. the ants show no significant bias in direction choice at any point of their (unsuccessful) search. This is also reflected in the area the foragers cover during their search: foragers visit wide areas, and their space use is not influenced by the areas visited by their nest mates. Hence, T. rugatulus foragers act independently on their food search and do not divide up the nest surroundings into individual search areas. While foragers act individually outside the nest, the nutritional status of the colony determines the number of ants leaving the nest to forage. The longer time a colony remains without food intake, the more individuals will go out to search for food. Is this strategy of food search optimal for small colonies? And does it depend on the distribution of food sources the ants tend to exploit? We introduce an individual-based model of ant foraging that allows the comparison of different strategies with respect to colony-level foraging success.