372 replies to this topic

[Ants_Texas]

That last picture is very fascinating. 

[Serafine]

snib

Btw mine are least bothered when I take pictures of them in the morning (between 7 and 12pm). You'd obviously have to test it out by yourself as each colony can be different but since they seem to be a mostly nocturnal species that generally would make sense (it's basically the time when they did most of the foraging and are digesting the food they've gathered during the night).
Also they are generally not THAT disturbed by light (unless it is really bright light), only when it comes combined with vibrations they get really really active.

[T.C.]

I'm gonna bet most people can't load this thread with all of these images.... but that's not a bad thing either.

[Serafine]

The colony continues it's nocturnal lifestyle. This is the outworld during the day (and yes, they made a massive trash pile again that took me half an hour to clean up).

 

 

When night (or shade) comes things change...

 

They really project their presence into the outworld now.

 

 

 

 

 

For a while they only drank sugar water with some mixed-in Sunburst. Now they all go for the dilluted maple syrup.

 

 

 

The old outworld water tube had to be replaced so I used a daylight lamp to get them out (just put the water tube into the open and removed the cotton plug so they would go out - still had to tap out half a dozen very stubborn ants in the end) and this offered a very very rare chance - making a video of them. Usually all you'd see would be the tails of them dissapearing into the nest because that's what they do as soon as the lights go on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now for the nest pictures.

I considered counting them but it'd be a hell of a work and I'm not sure if it's even doable to count those massive blobs that formed at several places in the nest.

 

The primary nest.

 

The nest water tubes.

 

The primary water tueb (old nest).

 

The tube leading into the outworld.

 

The outworld (very empty because I just removed the huge trash pile).

 

The Outworld water tube outposts.

 

The second container (with the graveyard).

 

The container sattelite outpost.

 

 

 

And finally some close-ups.

 

Old nest, upper part.

 

New nest, upper part.

 

Central egg hub (there's egg batches in other areas of the nest but most of them are here).

 

 

 

[Serafine]

Oh, and here is an update on the Amber Family.

 

They are hungry...

 

 

 

... which isn't surprising when you consider how much brood they have to feed.

 

Edited by Serafine, January 17 2018 - 4:40 PM.

[TennesseeAnts]

Do you have a journal for the Amber Family?

[Serafine]

No, because I don't really plan to keep them for a longer time, although that depends on whether they start to climb at some point (currently they don't do that at all and since they're usually an underground-only species there's a chance that it will stay like this forever but if not I'm gonna get problems because then they'd become almost impossible to contain). But time will tell.

[Jonathan21700]

How are you keeping the S. fugax from not hibernating and stopping development. 

Edited by Jonathan21700, January 18 2018 - 12:40 PM.

[Serafine]

I think they already had some sort of stagnation period over the last months and are just now starting to pick up. Although they're a native species in Germany they originate from southern Europe (meditarranian area) so I assume they don't really need that much of hibernation and have an endogenic rhythm.

[MegaMyrmex]

My gosh the sokenopsis fugax colony made me spit out my water :0 how big do the colonies get?! Also, nice Camponotus colony! Hopefully my C. Chromaoides will get that big...

[Serafine]

My gosh the solenopsis fugax colony made me spit out my water :0 how big do the colonies get?!

Big, very big. Although they're usually highly polygynous (they can adopt new queens after a nuptial flight). When they fly here they do in even more ridiculous numbers than Lasius niger (although I think that's because I live at the bottom end of a huge hillside with lots of meadows, in the city center Lasius niger clearly dominates).
 
They just ate 2 bee pupae (took them a day for each one). Now they're all in the nest, distributing the food bits. They seem to forage every few days and when they do they carry huge amounts of food into the nest (and in the days between you rarely see many of them outside). I guess that reflects the raiding behavior they have in nature.
 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
And now for Lazy Tube...
 
 
The fruit flies in my freezer went bad (I accidentally left the door slightly open over night once and the box was right in the front, good thing was the bee pupae weren't affected) so I went out and bought a new box. Within two days they ate about 200 fruit flies in addition to their regular bee brood and some minced meat.
 
I scattered most of them around the outworlds and put the rest into the feeding dish.

 
 
They quickly dragged of most of them out of the dish but didn't really carry them into the nest immediately.

 
However next morning... they were all gone.

 
I'm still not entirely sure why there is this huge ant blob in front of the entrance every night but I think it has something to do with (sugary) food distribution. When the maple syrup feeder ran completely dry once a week ago there was no big blob (only a really small one).

 
Here are some close-ups.

 

 
I also placed some fruit flies in the second outworld container. It's really cute to watch when they carry the fruit flies through the tubing.

 

 

Yesterday they hunted down their first living Terfly (flightless my ***, half of them could fly very fine). Well, "hunted down" is probably a bit beautified, it was more like panic-spraying until it eventually died, although later when the terfly was already sort of incapacitated some media workers really went in and wrestled with it.
The majors on the other hand were like "oh, that's none of my business so I'll just wait until you did your thing and stand guard while you're doing it". I get the impression that they are quite useless in fact - or they may just have a far better threat assessment than the smaller workers.

The workers did a bit better when I threw in more terflies later, so maybe they're learning.

There was also a sort of funny incident when a small worker was carrying a terfly back to the nest entrance and one of medium worker standing guard there recognized the terfly with it's antenna and tried to bite it - but it missed and bit the other worker in the head which apparently was kinda confusing and unpleasant for both ants.

Here they're chewing on the first terfly after it finally died.

 
And they managed to completely empty the maple syrup feeder in less than two weeks again.

 
 
The garbage pile is growing but only slowly - looks like there isn't much hatching going on at the moment.

 
The outworld nests are as popular as ever. There also seems to be an increasing amount of traffic between the second outworld (graveyard) and the primary one.

 
I accidentally massively overwatered the second nest - it took over half a dozen tissue paper sheets to remove most of the excess water and there is still lots of condensation on the glass top.

 
Probably also due to the high humidity this happened - fortunately they threw it on the garbage pile later that night.

 
 
And here are the nest pics (though not that much has changed).

 
Old nest.

 

 

 
New nest.

 

 
And the new nest central chamber.

Edited by Serafine, January 28 2018 - 4:24 AM.

[Mettcollsuss]

That thief ant colony is MASSIVE!

[YsTheAnt]

So is the camponotus colony... Any tips on keeping camponotus?

[Serafine]

That thief ant colony is MASSIVE!

No it's not. It's actually a pretty tiny colony (Solenopsis fugax can grow to over 100.000 workers although I'm not sure if that's possible with just one queen, they're usually very polygynous). All of my colonies are still very young (the Camponotus colony is maybe 10% of the size it can reach if not less).
I don't wanna sound too niggling but comments like these make me wonder how many people actually keep their colonies beyond the second or third year. I rarely see people posting pictures of adult colonies - yes there are species that only have small colonies but even an adult 2000 worker Formica fusca colony is a rare sight.
If people get impressed by juvenile colonies something with the antkeeping community feels a bit wrong to me.
 

So is the camponotus colony... Any tips on keeping camponotus?

Generally you need a lot of patience, especially at the start they grow really slow. But there are many different species of Camponotus which are all kinda different and this isn't really the place discuss them in all detail. Just open a new topic in general antkeeping and I will comment on that.

[Serafine]

Shrimp tubes! They really love those.

 

Lots of ants at the entrance during the night. There's lots of majors and a few (2-3) REALLY huge ones that stick out even between the other majors (one has a fiery orange thorax, the other one a blood red thorax with a dark brown upper side).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since they seem to occupy more ant more of the outworld their setup got a new expansion.

 

 

 

 

Half of the weekly trash pile (the rest was below that tree).

 

This is the trash from just one day.

 

 

 

More pictures of the shrimp tube outpost. When I once blew into the outworld a few days ago over a hundred ants erupted from the tubes.

 

 

The size difference between the minors and the bigger majors is pretty impressive.

 

There is quite a bit of activity in Outworld 2 now.

 

Yesterday they ate some crickets. Looks like they quickly get bored of anything that isn't bee brood or meat, so changing the kind of food frequently is a must.

 

 

 

So... let's go through the entire setup. It's getting really hard to estimate their numbers as they scatter all over the place now - they had about a week to occupy every corner of it and so they did.

 

 

They even found Outworld 4. There's not many ants in it (usually between 2 and 8) but they already made a small graveyard there.

 

 

 

Outworld 3 is definitely occupied, probably because of the feeder (diluted maple syrup) in it.

 

 

Outworld 2 has less activity, but then the water tube there is really small and they don't seem to like the pure maple syrup in that feeder. It's also where the main graveyard lies.

 

 

 

The arena water tubes are basically part of the nest at this point.

 

Edited by Serafine, February 11 2018 - 5:51 AM.

[Serafine]

In the main nest there's now many ants clinging to the walls which looks quite cute.

Still lots of space in the second nest, in fact they made a new garbage dump there which has a bit of mold but they don't seem to really throw a lot of trash on it as it is barely growing.

 

 

 

 

A few close-ups of different parts of the nest. Lots of tiny larvae but only a few eggs.

 

 

 

 

The nests seen from the other side.

 

 

 

And the water tubes with lots of fatties.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, and last but not least: The fast-growing Amber Family.

 

 

Edited by Serafine, February 11 2018 - 5:54 AM.

[Serafine]

I replaced the ugly tree with a nicer looking tree that takes up less space since they were barely using it anyway and usually just dumped their garbage around it. The whole setup looks much nicer now and hopefully the garbage dump will be easier to remove the next time.


I did some antification to the tree and drilled a hole in it but they haven't occupied it so far.


They're still mostly focused around the entrance area and the shrimp tubes. Oh, and they drink diluted maple syrup at an insane rate - that feeder was completely full barely two days ago.




How much garbage can a 1000+ worker Camponotus colony produce within 10 days? A lot. Pin for size comparison. Also gave up on keeping their dead cause they are now often dismembered or even cut into pieces.
At least they agreed on a single spot to dump their garbage now and do no longer stick any of it under the outworld water tubes. I still hope that they will start to carry the garbage into the other outworld once they occupied that tree.





Looks like they stopped using the old waste chambers and are now unloading all the pupa hulls into the new waste chamber or the outworld.












Some close-ups.












The Amber Family brood pile is really a PILE now. Note that hill the queen and her entourage is sitting on.

Edited by Serafine, February 23 2018 - 4:28 PM.

[FeedTheAnts]

How on earth do you feed the Amber Family? Are they in an outworld? 

[Serafine]

Yes, they are in a plastic box. That green straw is their nest entrance.

[YsTheAnt]

Yeah, you can see the straw poking through the cotton that I assume connects it.