9 replies to this topic

[FelixTheAnter]

Hey guys. Due to moving overseas I have to sell all my colonies. I have someone who will buy all of them from me, but wants the dirt setups transferred to test tubes...and this is proving WAY harder than I expected.

The Pheidole especially are absolutely refusing to move out of dirt, even when it's completely dry. They will hunker down under dry dirt/rocks. If I could spread it out over a large area so they can't dig that would help, but I'm already using a BIG tote and it's not worth the cost to buy something bigger.

I can't even just remove little bits of dirt at a time, because the colony is so massive that there's ants *everywhere*

Any suggestions/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[ANTdrew]

All you could really hope for is to miraculously find the queen by spreading the dirt. Getting most of the colony out of dirt seems almost impossible to me with ants like tiny Pheidole.

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

with basically no meaningful ant knowledge behind me:

I bet they move onto dry land as their nest floods.

If you could arrange some kind of "island" that would accommodate the colony(with test tubes or whatever) and arrange a very very slow flooding of the tote, like with a drip in one corner.
Then i would expect they continually move away form where things are getting wet. Until the only place that is, is the "island" container you've provided.
As long as the inlet of water is slow enough they should have time to escape it onto/into whatever you arrange for them.
 

[ANTdrew]

with basically no meaningful ant knowledge behind me:

I bet they move onto dry land as their nest floods.

If you could arrange some kind of "island" that would accommodate the colony(with test tubes or whatever) and arrange a very very slow flooding of the tote, like with a drip in one corner.
Then i would expect they continually move away form where things are getting wet. Until the only place that is, is the "island" container you've provided.
As long as the inlet of water is slow enough they should have time to escape it onto/into whatever you arrange for them.

This may actually work.

[dspdrew]

The way I always do it, is I remove as much dirt as possible, then I spread what's left along with the colony out in a flat bottomed, fluon-coated tub, so there is only a very thin layer of dirt and no lid. I place a test tube setup in there and wait for the dirt to dry out completely. The colony always moves into the test tube within a day, and as long as the dirt is spread thin enough, they find all of their brood and move that into the tube as well. I'll shake the dirt around a few times to make sure they get access to all of their brood.

[FelixTheAnter]

with basically no meaningful ant knowledge behind me:

I bet they move onto dry land as their nest floods.

If you could arrange some kind of "island" that would accommodate the colony(with test tubes or whatever) and arrange a very very slow flooding of the tote, like with a drip in one corner.
Then i would expect they continually move away form where things are getting wet. Until the only place that is, is the "island" container you've provided.
As long as the inlet of water is slow enough they should have time to escape it onto/into whatever you arrange for them.

This is brilliant! Especially since the Pheidole have always panicked and moved the entire nest upwards every time I watered the vivarium.

Let's see how this goes! Have about 3 drops per second going in, but will keep a close eye on it.

[rptraut]

Looks like a science fair project!

[100lols]

How’s it working???

[SHmealer]

I've moved multiple ant colonies out of soil by just putting water tubes on top and letting it dry out, they will eventually have to move into the water tube if they don't wanna dessicate

[FranklinKnight]

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