Summary: In multi colony ant algorithms several colonies of ants cooperate in finding good solutions for an optimization problem. At certain time steps the colonies exchange information about good solutions. If the amount of exchanged information is not too large multi colony ant algorithms can be easily parallelized in a natural way by placing the colonies on different processors. In this paper we study the behaviour of multi colony ant algorithms with different kinds of information exchange between the colonies. Moreover we compare the behaviour of different numbers of colonies with a multi start single colony ant algorithm. As test problems we use the Traveling Salesperson problem and the Quadratic Assignment problem.