2 replies to this topic

[NikolaBale]

Hey so i had two camponotus vagus colonies that where founded from this year's queens.
They seemed to he doing fine up until now.
I've been keeping them in a classic test tube set up.

So the problem is that the queens died.
Just the queens, and that just makes it even more of a mystery.

So I'm gonna try to describe how the acted and looked like before they died.

The first sign that i noticed is that the queens where unusually sluggish.
After a day or two this intensifies and now they have trouble walking, almost like their legs are softer or broken...
This kind of symptoms just keep getting worse until they just layed on their back and died.

If anyone know the cause of this it would be really helpful.

[futurebird]

That sucks. How big were the colonies? Were there eggs? How many workers?

What was the humidity like? I had a queen die from a fungus infection and it was kind of like that... but she never got a colony going. camponotus but not vagus. 

[NikolaBale]

That sucks. How big were the colonies? Were there eggs? How many workers?
What was the humidity like? I had a queen die from a fungus infection and it was kind of like that... but she never got a colony going. camponotus but not vagus.

About 30w each in the two colonies.
I don't know the exact humidity but was probably I'm the 60-70s as my room is 45-50%...And they where in a closed test tube.So maybe they where oversaturated.
Though a lot of people keeping vagus in test tubes and mostly they do fine.So if this species does poorly in test tubes it would probably be common knowledge.So idk.

Now that you mention a fungus infection i've been looking in to other reasons why they might have died.And i found one guy said his queen died from moldy sugar water.And now that i think about it my sugar water might have been compromised.I never really thought that sugar water could be get so bad that it would kill the ants.Maybe.