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[dboeren]

Is there any sort of calculation or rule of thumb to help tell how much space a colony will need?

 

I have a Tarheel Labyrinth and Mini-Hearth which are sized for medium to large species and I'm trying to figure out what can live in these without outgrowing them but I have zero intuition on how to translate square inches of nest space into number of ants at a given mm size so I can't tell whether this will support 500 ants or 2000 ants of whatever species.

 

It would be nice if I could look at a page that says "Camponotus whateverus has ~6mm workers and colonies grow to 2000 workers" and have a good idea whether that's a good fit to my formicaria or not.  ie, 6mm*2000 is 12000mm of ants and I have a 5x7" nest in the Labyrinth which is 35 square inches of nest and about another 6.125 square inches in the Mini-Hearth for 41.125 total and then be able to tell if 292mm of ants per square inch of nest is an appropriate amount of space or not or how much room I'd need to add to make it good.  Sounds a little crowded to me but they do pack themselves in so that might just be my mammal brain's reaction.

 

Thanks!

 

[ANTdrew]

Like everything with ants, this is a species specific calculation. The quality of care ants receive will also influence how fast they outgrow a nest. There also is a lot of genetic variation between queens of the same species.