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How to Start a Myrmica Colony

dermy myrmica

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#1 Offline dermy - Posted August 5 2017 - 10:54 AM

dermy

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This is how I start my Myrmica Colonies:

 

1- Wait till Nuptial flight season, catch queens that you find running around [can be hard, but it's not impossible]

2- Collect "Callow" Workers from a colony, [callows are workers that haven't darkened and have yet to take on the Colony scent] usually 12-15 is a good amount, not too much [I mean I guess you could, but that'd be really cheating a lot] but if you don't get enough, you might not get the best results [you are trying to basically skip the first "founding stage" after all]

3- Introduce the queen to the workers, generally, you don't need to worry about the workers killing the queen, it's usually the queen killing the workers that you need to worry about, assuming you got callows, Don't Do This with regular Workers! ]

 

 

Here's a video on how it worked [so far, I will keep updating in a journal sometime on how it goes]

 

 

 

 

I bet you could add more queens, but I didn't want to push it and I wanted to see a 1 queened Myrmica colony, instead of the 20+ queened one I currently have.


  • Connectimyrmex and Bracchymyrmex like this

#2 Offline Connectimyrmex - Posted October 19 2017 - 9:38 AM

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Nice tutorial! I'm founding my queen from scratch, though. SHe actually has six eggs! (The most I've ever gotten with a semi claustral queen that's not Pseudomyrmex)


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