6 replies to this topic

[KadinB]

Hello. When I first found out about this hobby it was my friend who told me about it. I wasn't really interested in it at all and he was still noob and and AC fan boy at the time haha. But he's not anymore. I then found some AC vid that got recommended on youtube almost 2 years ago. I immediately wanted to buy some AC products and get my own colony started. I asked my mom if I could keep ants and all that and she said yes SOMEHOW luckily. I got into ant keeping in the winter also so I had to wait some time to catch some queens. On may 27th of 2020 I experienced my first ever flight. I had my friend over that day also which was cool cause he could catch some queens to. Tetramorium immigrans were flying. We found out they flew cause my mom wanted me to clean out the kid pool and we saw tons of dead males. We both knew that if there were dead males than queens mated. I hurried to clean out the pool so I can go look. But my friend didn't want to and was thinking queens were impossible to find. Him and my brother played with water balloons why I went to go and take a walk around the neighborhood a bit. I found nothing going around once and decided to go back for my friend. They ran out of water balloons so he came to go look. We stepped out of the driveway and immediately found our first queen. We were super exited and happy. But skip a bit ahead we caught I think 12 queens and put some together. We were also limited on test tubes because we only had 10 AC test tubes. We were still noob and never knew about how cheap test tubes were on other websites and stuff. I kept the tetras for a few months until they all died of a twitching insect from outside... so rip those guys. But around June my friend ended up catching a formica queen at 3500 elevation at a place here in nor cal called philbrook. He said he saw tons of alates but he had to leave and couldn't catch many. But he got some males and 1 mated formica queen. The colony is still alive and well. They are at 40 workers. They also hibernate early to. But skip further. I remember just searching ants on my phone and I found a ender ants video. Then in part of the vid he said to join his discord server. I thought about it and decided to. I joined and that's when my ant keeping experience took off. I got to meet ant keepers who knew how to actually keep ants and what to buy and stuff. I got tons of info from them and became better and better with ants. I was there for about a few months around autumn. Then around winter someone sent me a dm saying I should join AKE. I joined it and met even more experienced ant keepers. Then I got to know a lot about ants on there. Then stricky sent me a message telling me where I can buy queens which was formiculture. I got it on tapatalk and looked through market place and said some dumb stuff when I first joined and spammed it a bit. Very sorry about that. That still bothers me after a year almost. But I found Ecans shop and bought 3 Camponotus semi queens. Basically I'm just telling part of my story on my ant keeping journey. But then I soon made my own ant shop. I got some money from it from selling some colony's I had gotten. I had money which meant I could buy more ant stuff and basically make my ant keeping experience better. This summer has been awesome. I have been able to get almost all my legal dream sp in one year cause of my ant shop. Thank you all sooooooo much for buying colonys. You guys have made my ant keeping experience 100 times better! I'm so glad I met also these nice people in the ant keeping community and made some friends. Idk what I would be doing without ants haha. But thank you all for helping me on questions I have had and for buying ants from me so I can get better ants! Thank you all!!!! I also just told a bit of my ant keeping journey above. I may have said something that doesn’t make sense also cause of how long this is lol. Thanks to anyone who also read all of this. It took me half an hour lol.

Edited by KadinB, August 29 2021 - 1:04 AM.

[strawnkayden1]

Hello. When I first found out about this hobby it was my friend who told me about it. I wasn't really interested in it at all and he was still noob and and AC fan boy at the time haha. But he's not anymore. I then found some AC vid that got recommended on youtube almost 2 years ago. I immediately wanted to buy some AC products and get my own colony started. I asked my mom if I could keep ants and all that and she said yes SOMEHOW luckily. I got into ant keeping in the winter also so I had to wait some time to catch some queens. On may 27th of 2020 I experienced my first ever flight. I had my friend over that day also which was cool cause he could catch some queens to. Tetramorium immigrans were flying. We found out they flew cause my mom wanted me to clean out the kid pool and we saw tons of dead males. We both knew that if there were dead males than queens mated. I hurried to clean out the pool so I can go look. But my friend didn't want to and was thinking queens were impossible to find. Him and my brother played with water balloons why I went to go and take a walk around the neighborhood a bit. I found nothing going around once and decided to go back for my friend. They ran out of water balloons so he came to go look. We stepped out of the driveway and immediately found our first queen. We were super exited and happy. But skip a bit ahead we caught I think 12 queens and put some together. We were also limited on test tubes because we only had 10 AC test tubes. We were still noob and never knew about how cheap test tubes were on other websites and stuff. I kept the tetras for a few months until they all died of a twitching insect from outside... so rip those guys. But around June my friend ended up catching a formica queen at 3500 elevation at a place here in nor cal called philbrook. He said he saw tons of alates but he had to leave and couldn't catch many. But he got some males and 1 mated formica queen. The colony is still alive and well. They are at 40 workers. They also hibernate early to. But skip further. I remember just searching ants on my phone and I found a ender ants video. Then in part of the vid he said to join his discord server. I thought about it and decided to. I joined and that's when my ant keeping experience took off. I got to meet ant keepers who knew how to actually keep ants and what to buy and stuff. I got tons of info from them and became better and better with ants. I was there for about a few months around autumn. Then around winter someone sent me a dm saying I should join AKE. I joined it and met even more experienced ant keepers. Then I got to know a lot about ants on there. Then stricky sent me a message telling me where I can buy queens which was formiculture. I got it on tapatalk and looked through market place and said some dumb stuff when I first joined and spammed it a bit. Very sorry about that. That still bothers me after a year almost. But I found Ecans shop and bought 3 Camponotus semi queens. Then basically I'm just telling part of my story on my ant keeping journey. But then I soon made my own ant shop. I got some money from it from selling some colony's I had gotten. I had money which meant I could buy more ant stuff and basically make my ant keeping experience better. This summer has been awesome. I have been able to get almost all my legal dream sp in one year cause of my ant shop. Thank you all sooooooo much for buying colonys. You guys have made my ant keeping experience 100 times better! I'm so glad I met also these nice people in the ant keeping community and made some friends. Idk what I would be doing without ants haha. But thank you all for helping me on questions I have had and for buying ants from me so I can get better ants! Thank you all!!!! I also just told a bit of my ant keeping journey above. I may have said something that don't make sense also cause of how long this is lol. Thanks to anyone who also read all of this. It took me half an hour lol.

Finished reading and there was some glossing over of that one species we don’t talk about.

[KadinB]

 

Hello. When I first found out about this hobby it was my friend who told me about it. I wasn't really interested in it at all and he was still noob and and AC fan boy at the time haha. But he's not anymore. I then found some AC vid that got recommended on youtube almost 2 years ago. I immediately wanted to buy some AC products and get my own colony started. I asked my mom if I could keep ants and all that and she said yes SOMEHOW luckily. I got into ant keeping in the winter also so I had to wait some time to catch some queens. On may 27th of 2020 I experienced my first ever flight. I had my friend over that day also which was cool cause he could catch some queens to. Tetramorium immigrans were flying. We found out they flew cause my mom wanted me to clean out the kid pool and we saw tons of dead males. We both knew that if there were dead males than queens mated. I hurried to clean out the pool so I can go look. But my friend didn't want to and was thinking queens were impossible to find. Him and my brother played with water balloons why I went to go and take a walk around the neighborhood a bit. I found nothing going around once and decided to go back for my friend. They ran out of water balloons so he came to go look. We stepped out of the driveway and immediately found our first queen. We were super exited and happy. But skip a bit ahead we caught I think 12 queens and put some together. We were also limited on test tubes because we only had 10 AC test tubes. We were still noob and never knew about how cheap test tubes were on other websites and stuff. I kept the tetras for a few months until they all died of a twitching insect from outside... so rip those guys. But around June my friend ended up catching a formica queen at 3500 elevation at a place here in nor cal called philbrook. He said he saw tons of alates but he had to leave and couldn't catch many. But he got some males and 1 mated formica queen. The colony is still alive and well. They are at 40 workers. They also hibernate early to. But skip further. I remember just searching ants on my phone and I found a ender ants video. Then in part of the vid he said to join his discord server. I thought about it and decided to. I joined and that's when my ant keeping experience took off. I got to meet ant keepers who knew how to actually keep ants and what to buy and stuff. I got tons of info from them and became better and better with ants. I was there for about a few months around autumn. Then around winter someone sent me a dm saying I should join AKE. I joined it and met even more experienced ant keepers. Then I got to know a lot about ants on there. Then stricky sent me a message telling me where I can buy queens which was formiculture. I got it on tapatalk and looked through market place and said some dumb stuff when I first joined and spammed it a bit. Very sorry about that. That still bothers me after a year almost. But I found Ecans shop and bought 3 Camponotus semi queens. Then basically I'm just telling part of my story on my ant keeping journey. But then I soon made my own ant shop. I got some money from it from selling some colony's I had gotten. I had money which meant I could buy more ant stuff and basically make my ant keeping experience better. This summer has been awesome. I have been able to get almost all my legal dream sp in one year cause of my ant shop. Thank you all sooooooo much for buying colonys. You guys have made my ant keeping experience 100 times better! I'm so glad I met also these nice people in the ant keeping community and made some friends. Idk what I would be doing without ants haha. But thank you all for helping me on questions I have had and for buying ants from me so I can get better ants! Thank you all!!!! I also just told a bit of my ant keeping journey above. I may have said something that don't make sense also cause of how long this is lol. Thanks to anyone who also read all of this. It took me half an hour lol.

Finished reading and there was some glossing over of that one species we don’t talk about.

 

Haha yea I was gonna mention it but idk why I didn't. Ig it don't really matter haha.

[Antkeeper01]

was it polyergus queen? i remeber you mentioning that in a thread

[KadinB]

was it polyergus queen? i remeber you mentioning that in a thread

Oh no lol. I should have mentioned that was my best find ever. Found that queen in june of 2020. 

[Dumpling]

Hello. When I first found out about this hobby it was my friend who told me about it. I wasn't really interested in it at all and he was still noob and and AC fan boy at the time haha. But he's not anymore. I then found some AC vid that got recommended on youtube almost 2 years ago. I immediately wanted to buy some AC products and get my own colony started. I asked my mom if I could keep ants and all that and she said yes SOMEHOW luckily. I got into ant keeping in the winter also so I had to wait some time to catch some queens. On may 27th of 2020 I experienced my first ever flight. I had my friend over that day also which was cool cause he could catch some queens to. Tetramorium immigrans were flying. We found out they flew cause my mom wanted me to clean out the kid pool and we saw tons of dead males. We both knew that if there were dead males than queens mated. I hurried to clean out the pool so I can go look. But my friend didn't want to and was thinking queens were impossible to find. Him and my brother played with water balloons why I went to go and take a walk around the neighborhood a bit. I found nothing going around once and decided to go back for my friend. They ran out of water balloons so he came to go look. We stepped out of the driveway and immediately found our first queen. We were super exited and happy. But skip a bit ahead we caught I think 12 queens and put some together. We were also limited on test tubes because we only had 10 AC test tubes. We were still noob and never knew about how cheap test tubes were on other websites and stuff. I kept the tetras for a few months until they all died of a twitching insect from outside... so rip those guys. But around June my friend ended up catching a formica queen at 3500 elevation at a place here in nor cal called philbrook. He said he saw tons of alates but he had to leave and couldn't catch many. But he got some males and 1 mated formica queen. The colony is still alive and well. They are at 40 workers. They also hibernate early to. But skip further. I remember just searching ants on my phone and I found a ender ants video. Then in part of the vid he said to join his discord server. I thought about it and decided to. I joined and that's when my ant keeping experience took off. I got to meet ant keepers who knew how to actually keep ants and what to buy and stuff. I got tons of info from them and became better and better with ants. I was there for about a few months around autumn. Then around winter someone sent me a dm saying I should join AKE. I joined it and met even more experienced ant keepers. Then I got to know a lot about ants on there. Then stricky sent me a message telling me where I can buy queens which was formiculture. I got it on tapatalk and looked through market place and said some dumb stuff when I first joined and spammed it a bit. Very sorry about that. That still bothers me after a year almost. But I found Ecans shop and bought 3 Camponotus semi queens. Basically I'm just telling part of my story on my ant keeping journey. But then I soon made my own ant shop. I got some money from it from selling some colony's I had gotten. I had money which meant I could buy more ant stuff and basically make my ant keeping experience better. This summer has been awesome. I have been able to get almost all my legal dream sp in one year cause of my ant shop. Thank you all sooooooo much for buying colonys. You guys have made my ant keeping experience 100 times better! I'm so glad I met also these nice people in the ant keeping community and made some friends. Idk what I would be doing without ants haha. But thank you all for helping me on questions I have had and for buying ants from me so I can get better ants! Thank you all!!!! I also just told a bit of my ant keeping journey above. I may have said something that doesn’t make sense also cause of how long this is lol. Thanks to anyone who also read all of this. It took me half an hour lol.

I just got into the ant keeping hobby and have 2 colonies, 1 C. vicinus with 5 workers, 1 C. semitesatatuous with 1 worker (I know I spelled it wrong I'm just too lazy to look it up), and two founding queens, camponotus vicinus and brachymrmex sp. I bought them all except the brachymyrmex from sleepyasiananter. I'm super excited to be a part of this hobby, the community is epic and I too joined many ant keeping discord servers. I'm gonna buy a small novomessor cockerelli colony this weekend if the person doesn't sell out. I've had so much fun just reading and looking at other peoples ant journals. 

[cap_backfire]

I love these posts. As a new antkeeper they are so cool. Thanks for posting and know that many other noobs (I still only have about 9 months myself) appreciate this community of collected wisdom.