Hey guys! Been quite a while since I posted, but seeing how few Fire Ant journals are around on Formiculture these days, I decided to throw mine into the mix. I've had this colony for 30 weeks now, and have kept consistent video updates every two weeks or so, but have never gotten the chance to create a journal on them. Until now. Without further ado, let's begin!
October 16, 2022 (Week 2)
This all began with a challenge I set myself... When I first moved to Thailand from Australia, I vowed to keep and raise the first ant queen I find, no matter what species, no excuses. I was hoping for something cool like an Oecophylla or Odontomachus queen, but the first queen I encountered turned out to be a Geminata. Welp, I've heard a lot of bad stuff about them, especially their scary growth rate, but they can't be all bad, right?
October 30, 2022 (Week 4)
Starting to fall in love with this cute little founding queen, her tiny nanitic pupae are sooo cute... (The fact that they went from egg to pupae in THREE WEEKS didn't seem to hit home at the time - that's insane compared to anything I've seen in Australia)
November 13, 2022 (Week 6)
Here we go, 8 workers, 5 dark pupae and plenty more brood... Their test tube was also getting a bit dirty, which was concerning, but they didn't seem to care too much :-D
November 27, 2022 (Week 8)
Oh boy. 15+ workers, brood galore - and I thought this was too fast at the time... clearly I did not expect what would be coming next
December 11, 2022 (Week 10)
After nearly suffocating them by accident, I dumped them all into a Mini Hearth outworld... The ants were all unconscious, and I thought I stuffed up good 
Fortunately they all reanimated within half an hour, and the video is them after making a full recovery, a day later.
December 25, 2022 (Week 12)
They built a dome out of sand, and completely denied any hope of filming or observing them... Nice. They stayed in this dome for the whole of Thailand's Winter, so it wasn't until February next year that I made the next update.
February 26, 2023 (Week 20)
Well, I accidentally destroyed their sand dome when feeding one day, and what I saw both thrilled and scared me... They've grown. A lot. About 40+ workers, and lots more brood 
Now that Winter was over, the fun could really begin.
March 19, 2023 (Week 23)
Exponential growth has begun, I'm not even going to bother counting, but they've at least doubled as of 3 weeks ago 
April 2, 2023 (Week 25)
Easily triple what they had 2 weeks ago 
Help?
April 16, 2023 (Week 27)
BOOM. Tripled AGAIN. 200+ workers, and counting 
To get a perspective you must watch the footage yourself
April 30, 2023 (Week 29)
Like, it's not even funny anymore... 500+, easily a lot more, and double that in brood. They went from 50 or so workers to several hundred in a month, is this good news? 
That's what has happened so far, and a rather huge update tomorrow, so stay tuned! 
