372 replies to this topic

[Serafine]

There's a lot of traffic here.





They dragged one of the waxworms into thr long tubing piece...




Nest looks like usual. Just a few pupae but lots of small larvae that are growing slowly.
























Here you can see how the larvae have adapted hibernation - their cross-section is U-shaped instead of round and fat. They almost look like tiny bathtubs.





A super cute ant-themed present from my sister =)




Got a nice terrarium for super super cheap (90% off). It's designed for small rodents but I'm gonna mis-use it as a Blattarium.
Right now there's an adult couple and four small nymphs in there. One day it's going to be a feeder insect station but I probably need to add a few smaller nymphs to speed it up, so it doesn't take over a year.








The gentleman is trying to impress the lady. Looks like he succeded by now so there's probably going to be cute baby roaches in a few weeks (does anyone know for how long Dubias are pregnant?).

Edited by Serafine, January 1 2019 - 7:07 AM.

[Serafine]

They're back!


Well, they were never really gone as there always was a certain base level of activity but everything (activity, food consumption, brood development) had been reduced a lot during the last 2-3 months.




Towards the end of January they started to carry pupae into the outworld - or to really special places because why not.








February then brought the great spring cleaning where they threw all their trash at the outworld garbarge dump. When I cleaned the place it took them less then four days to create a pile that was even larger than the first one.




The great terfly massacre in mid february.




They also like their bee brood again.




The main part of the colony now actually lives outside of the primary nest (that's where all the brood is). The first picture shows the inhabitants of the shrimp tubes, the second image is the "end of the world tube" almost 8 meters away from the main nest
It's going to be interesting to see what happens when I give them an outworld featuring a home-made Ytong-Nest (probably at some time in summer), they really seems to live tubular living spaces.






The first eggs of this year spotted at Jan 31st - interstingly in one of the outworld tubes, not the main nest.




Second batch of eggs, this time in the main nest.




That's what the main breeding hub in nest 4 looked at the end of January.

[Serafine]

At some point during their diapause they started to put dirt to the feeders, thankfully this habbit didn't stick.




They really like wax worms (probably because they're so juice) and can be astonishingly aggressive towards them.








Since early March they're back to doing these big gatherings when there's fresh food. Be brood which they mostly ignored during their winter pause has also become very popular again.






They dug chambers around the two front edges of the second large arena but I can't say how many workers there are because the chambers are well-hidden in the substrate.
They're also populating the smaller side-arenas again.






With cat food (pure meat) they still just lick up all the juices and chew on it until all that's left is the hard dry meat. Interestingly cat food that doesn't contain Cassia gum or other plant crap smells a lot less than cat food with plant matter in it.




"My ants went on a fishing trip and this happened!"

It was really cool to watch the ants grab individual red mosquito larvae and drag them out of that little pond. At first they were very sceptic but after most of the water had dried up they carried almost all of the mozzy larvae back to main nest.

Edited by Serafine, March 4 2019 - 3:35 AM.

[Serafine]

And some nest pics. There's a lot going on.
































The majesty herself.

Edited by Serafine, March 4 2019 - 3:36 AM.

[Serafine]

And finally some videos.

Yes I made a few videos. They're all raw footage though. Uncut, no music, a bit wobbly and not of best quality - light-sensitive ants and home cameras don't go well together.
Hope you'll like them anyway, at some point I'm going to make an actual proper video (that is if Youtube, Twitter, Instagramm & Co do still exist in Europe in a few months).

[TennesseeAnts]

My C.chromaiodes love waxworms too. Also, how large are your ants (In millimeters.)?

[Ants4fun]

Looking good! Great pics

[Serafine]

My C.chromaiodes love waxworms too. Also, how large are your ants (In millimeters.)?

The smallest minims are around 5mm, the average minor is 8-9mm and the largest majors are up to 18mm. Queen is around 16mm.

[TennesseeAnts]

Yeah I have noticed that a lot of Camponotus super majors are larger than the queen. This is even more recognizable in smaller myrmentoma Camponotus (Like C. carae.)

[Rstheant]

Update?

[rbarreto]

How would one hibernate a colony of that size?

[YsTheAnt]

How would one hibernate a colony of that size?

Since this species is from a warm climate, dropping their temperature down to just below room temperature satisfies their diapause needs.

[Serafine]

Update?

Update is in preparation, most likely coming this weekend. Just wanted to wait for the new feeders, which just arrived =)

 

How would one hibernate a colony of that size?

You don't really need to. They're a mediterranean species so they don't really have the same hibernation behavior as species from northern regions, they just become a lot less active, eat much less and brood growth pretty much comes to a stop for 2-4 months. Usually just plugging out the heating cable is enough to make them hibernate (also Camponotus have an internal clock, so they hibernate no matter what the environment temperature is).

Edited by Serafine, April 5 2019 - 5:09 PM.

[Serafine]

Okay, so let's do this...
 
 
We're going to start with a few pictures from the main outworld.
 

 

 

 
 
So I noticed they were kinda low on the shrimp sand they usually use for their nest garbage chambers and gave them some more - this is what they used it for.
 

 
 
Some pictures from the rarely mentioned but also very important smaller outworlds (these are the Antkit ones if you remember).
 

 

 

 
 
Going on to the second big outworld, here they're eating some bee brood and two dishes of cat food (unfortunately I had to throw away one of those feeding dishes cause it's underside was starting to fall apart)
 

 
 
They dug some sort of entrance along the side of this stone but I have absolutely no idea how large the chamber below there is.
 

 
 
A ton of ants is now hiding inside these shrimp tubes (actually far more than in the test tubes), they usually only come out in the middle of the night.
 

 
 
The hit and miss testing has scored another hit. Cat food mae from Tuna and some Calamari. They really are into this stuff.
 

 

 

 
 
They're still not saying no to some tasty locusts though.
 

 
 
They seem to have some trouble with the adult roaches though, at least if they're served in one piece.
 

 
 
This sugar jelly stuff is a bit of a mixed bag - they really like it (at least the banana one) but all they do is liking on it's surface and taking out some itsy bits. After 2-3 days they will start to throw debris at it and ignore it as can be seen in the second picture, next to the worker ant that is putting the incredbile Hulk to shame (they like to lick on the jelly but I'm always throwing away 99% of it anyway which is kinda annoying - well, I basically got them for free with my Antkit outworld order, so not going to complain).
 

 

 
 
Some more pictures of ants in the second outworld just doign their thing.
 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, April 15 2019 - 6:24 AM.

[Serafine]

So here's something special. You may have noticed that the workers differ in color, their thorax segments in particular can range from dark blood red to fiery orange and some majors have at least partially dark red heads - but this worker is kinda one of it's kind. She has a very pale thorax and a mostly red head with red mandibles, also she's definitely not a callow as she's been like this for over a week now. Probably some sort of extrem color variant/color mutant.

 

 

 

After some recent discussion about sugar contents of various liquids I started add some Glucose sugars to my regular maple syrup mix and the ants seem to greatly appreciate that. They really tanked up once they discovered that stuff.

 

 

 

I also added some green food coloring to the sweets once just for laughs and giggles but it would probably take weeks for it to show any effect on the brood considering how many ants there are in the colony and how much it is going to be diluted before it reaches any of the brood.

 

 

 

 

 

They still enjoy their sunbaths, although I've noticed that if I leave the lamp off for a few days there's actually more ants in the arena than otherwise. Probably something to do with the disurbance and ants slowly aggregating in undisturbed areas.

 

 

 

 

So finally the new byFormica feeders arrived! Huge thanks to Terry for gifting me those, it's greatly appreciated.

 

 

 

As always the packaging is nothing less of stellar. Seriously you could throw this pack against the wall and the feeders inside wouldn't even notice. Also it just looks amazing.

 

 

 

I haven't seen much of a comparison between those and the old ones so I made some picture with both feeders next to each other.

As you can see the ports on the new ones are MUCH bigger - even my majors can drink from them now which is great as they are far more efficient at supplying other workers (not so sure about the Supermajors as some of them have super broad heads but theoretically they should fit in there as well).

 

 

 

 

 

With the feeders also came a bottle of the new Sunburst, so I put something into one of the small feeding dishes for a test feeding and wow, they sucked it dry in no-time. Haven't seen them filling their gasters that fast in like forever. In the end they looked like little walking lightbulbs.

 

 

 

Took them less than two hours and everything was gone.

 

 

 

 

Here's a worker sharing the Sunburst with one of her sisters.

 

 

 

It took them a few hours to get used to the new feeders. Initially they didn't find the sweets so they started to dump trash on them, putting a tiny drop of Sunburst into some of the holes from the outside really helped them to realize that there were sweets around, so they started to lick them up and then examine the feeders at which point they finally understood waht this new weird thing actually was. Now they're already gotten used to them and find their sweets instantly.

 

I haven't yet used the huge 16ml version but I'm sure it will come in very handy soon when they go into full scale summer production.

 

 

 

 

 

And here are the nest pics. There's tons of fat larvae (they no longer look like little bathtubs) and quite a few pupae but the real pupating wave hasn't yet started. Probably just a matter of time though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Serafine]

More nest pics from a closer point of view.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here's some close-ups.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More eggs. There's not a lot of them and not a lot of tiny larvae either so I guess the queen is probably done with the current batch and will probably start to lay more in a few weeks.

 

 

 

Brood in the nest water tubes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brood in the primary outworld water tubes (there's a few tiny larvae near the cotton).

 

 

 

Brood in the second big outworld water tubes. After the weekend they had cleared all of the brood from the two big water tubes so I took the chance and replaced both of them (so the pics aren't super up-to-date). Didn't replace the small tube though as there's still brood in it.

 

 

 

Final picture for this update, a chewing community eating through a cricket. Didn't see that there was dirt on the glass and when I lined up for a another shot the community had already broken off due to the influx of light, so unfortunately that's the best we can get. Looks still lovely though.

 

 

[drtrmiller]

My browser nearly melted after loading the 200 MB worth of images all at once.

 

But after they loaded, I can say that this makes me really want to stop starving my ants and let their numbers run wild.  Look at all those hungry larvae!  Such an incredible amount of growth!

 

 

I also appreciate this comparison.  It really puts into perspective the changes to the feeding port size and brim.  This new design should both work better, and be more durable than previous generations.

 

Edited by drtrmiller, April 10 2019 - 3:27 PM.

[sirjordanncurtis]

Did you remove the sand from the water feeder? Or just let it stay?

[Serafine]

They started to remove the trash on their own after they realized it was a feeder but I also washed it after they had emptied it the first time. It didn't leak, so it was fine. The only ants that could probably make this feeder leak are my Solenopsis fugax but they make every feeder leak by just burrowing it until only the top of the glass sticks out. I'd say under semi-normal circumstances these feeders are very very leak-safe (much more than the old ones).

 

My browser nearly melted after loading the 200 MB worth of images all at once.
 
But after they loaded, I can say that this makes me really want to stop starving my ants and let their numbers run wild.  Look at all those hungry larvae!  Such an incredible amount of growth!

Big colonies are awesome. It's so much fun watching them grow and flourish.

 

I also appreciate this comparison.  It really puts into perspective the changes to the feeding port size and brim.  This new design should both work better, and be more durable than previous generations.

That's true. Over the last 2 years I lost about 1mm of the base on one of the old feeders (around 5-10% of the base diameter, nothing that would be a detriment to it's function, it still works perfectly well), the new ones doesn't look like it's going to have the same issue as their base is much thicker.

Edited by Serafine, April 10 2019 - 11:46 PM.

[FSTP]

They are number one!