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Post by Thebugman on Dec 15, 2015 16:53:39 GMT
Still lots of brood in this colony as well as continued foraging. Thankfully they appear to be remaining active even in the cold weather, although at are living at a much slower pace than they was in the summer.
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Post by Thebugman on Jan 17, 2016 23:07:37 GMT
Unfortunately for this colony, their glass tank in which they lived was smashed by accident (not by me!) a few weeks ago. This meant that the ants needed relocating to a new tank, which is what I did today. I allowed the soil to dry up and began scooping it out with my hands until I nearly reached the bottom, at which point I tipped the soil into a storage container and began gently shifting through the soil to grab as many ants as I could find, this took me about 2 hours and I must have collected 150+ ants. I found the queen almost immediately after I tipped the soil and she was upset and covered in soil, but safe and sound. I took a few nasty bites from the large majors. Although I managed to save most (hopefully all) of the ants, most of the brood was lost as I only managed to find a few larvae and pupa but they can be replaced. The colony is now currently exploring their new home which is a slightly larger tank than they had before. Below is a video of the queen with her large majors, who was separate from the rest of the colony.
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Post by Thebugman on Jan 25, 2016 19:44:28 GMT
The ants have being building non stop for the past week. Their new soil nest has 4 large entrances which have a constant flow of workers coming in and out of them with mouthfuls of dirt. In the soil transfer from the old tank to the new tank, it appears some seeds got mixed into the soil and have begun to grow, I am unsure whether to let the grow or to remove them, I will leave them for now. There is also some condensation building up on the glass, so I have put a small desk fan in their nest so that I can turn it on and remove the condensation.
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Post by Thebugman on Mar 1, 2016 21:56:28 GMT
This colony is doing well. I removed their heat mat and saw lots of pupa and 50 or so eggs, I am expecting a population boom soon. I do not feed this colony protien as much as my other colonies as they get a lot of protein from seeds, so I gave them a dubia roach and they loved it; they were feeding off of it for a couple of days before it completely dried up. I will upload the video of them feeding sometime tomorrow.
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Post by Thebugman on Apr 4, 2016 21:24:49 GMT
Here is the video I promised, better late than never. Sorry for the quality. I have just given this colony some fresh seeds and a roach as well as spraying their tank to moisten the soil. There are now about 20 workers at the surface gathering seeds and feeding on the roach, so all seems to be going well with this colony. I have no idea of the number of brood they have as they keep it out of sight so I can only assume that there is an increasing amount.
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Post by Thebugman on May 24, 2016 20:25:40 GMT
For a species that feeds mainly on seeds this colony goes crackers when they are offered protein. They are the only colony that I own that seem to like mealworms just as much as crickets. A flood of workers storms out whenever they are offered protein, and they attempt to drag in the food through their nest entrance which only works half of the time. If that fails, the huge black major workers come out and attempt to cut up the food into smaller pieces. I saw the colonies brood pile yesterday, which was about 10 small larvae. I can only assume that there is more brood out of sight, but seeing the brood pile was reassuring as I hadn't seen brood for a few weeks, so it tells me that the queen is alive and well.
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Post by Thebugman on Mar 26, 2017 23:25:15 GMT
This colony has woken up from hibernation. I didn't expect them to hibernate but they did. On a daily basis they bring a small amount of brood to the surface into the heat of the sun. This is the first evidence I have seen that the queen is alive since I moved them. Hopefully this will be another productive year for this colony.
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