Summer 10th December 2018
Took a peek at my ants in the styrofoam and heat cable incubator
Meat ant queen - Iridomyrmex purpureus 14mm queen
16mm test tube - in styrofoam and heat cable incubator
5 pupa, 24+ brood
Another 3 pupa showed up overnight!
Camponotus suffusus bendigensis 17mm queen 2
20mm Test tube - in styrofoam and heat cable incubator
16 brood - 5 cocoons - raw honey dish
Another cocoon for 5 total!
Pheidole antipodum 14-15mm queens x 11
in styrofoam and heat cable incubator
All setups have a styro foam double chamber entrance
1) triple queen - red dirt, no double chamber entrance - cleared all the red dirt and heaped up it into a low wall at the middle of the test tube
huge single stack of eggs
2) Triple queen - cardboard insert and aquarium filter wool
stack of eggs
3) queen with coco coir - moved half the coco coir against the cotton dam. The other half remains where she pushed it, up against the styrofoam double chamber entrance
big stack of eggs
4) queen with red dirt - moved the red dirt to block up the double chamber entrance
small clump of 15+ eggs
5) queen with white sand - 4th queen from setup 1 moved here
6) queen - bare test tube
7) queen, former partner of queen 6 - bare test tube
Queen 5 was found dead, with no eggs, so she probably died quite a while ago
her sand was still really wet so I dried it up a bit.
Quad queen setup 1 has a huge stack of eggs, but one queen appears to be out of the group, so I moved her out into the dead queen 6's setup.
Red dirt was pretty dry now
The dual queen setup didn't appear to have an egg stack, just a few scattered ones..
Anyway I split them up and forced both into the inner chamber of their own test tubes...
You can see all the queens cleared the substrate out of the way, so maybe it was waste of time....
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Progress after 10 days
Former quad queen, big stack of eggs. That fourth queen hanging out the back
click to enlarge
triple queen - they have some more eggs under the queens
coco coir queen with the dead white sand queen.
Big stack of eggs for a single queen!
red dirt queen, moved all the red dirt to block the chamber entrance, pretty good craftsmanship