Update to the formacaruim.
Hey guys, I have updated my plastic formacaruim, I am starting to think of my formacaruim as a space station because I can add modules to it. I have yet to see if my ants will use it. They are still a small colony but I will leave it there anyway.
So I started out with transparent containers used for cosmetics. That I obtained from a local plastics store here in South Africa.
I used a soldering Iron to make the holes in the plastic. Clear plastic is pretty brittle, So this is my favourite method to make the holes. A word of caution, the fumes of the melting plastic may cause irritation to the lungs, so I advise that you do it in a well ventilated room if you want to use that method to make holes…
This is just a look at how it looks after I have made the hole.
I took a short piece of tubing to connect the individual pieces together.
I managed to get the holes pretty uniform and in similar areas on the container so that made it easy to fit the containers together. The only thing that I messed up with a bit is that I made the holes a bit high.
For my reservoir, I just connected a container in the same fashion and just stuck a piece of sponge in there. I filled the tubes that lead into that container with cotton so that the moisture can bleed into the others that are being used for brood.
I made some holes in the tops of the containers because I notice that there tends to be a lot of condensation in most of the formicariums that I have seen. The big container is a clear plastic container that is used to store photographs.
The large container gave me the biggest hassle, because of the tubing I have selected for it. But I managed to make a hole that allows the tube to fit like a glove.
All that was left was to connect it to the main founding chamber and outworld.
I placed the setup on a tray, because I fear that too much movement would cause the individual containers to come loose. So it seems to be working for me this way.
The foraging workers have been regularly coming into the new open area but they haven’t found the formicarium yet…. So far, so good.
What haven’t show is my feeders that I used; I will post that in that collection of feeders topic. I have covered the new formicarium with tinfoil to encourage the ants to migrate to the new nest but I don’t think it will happen until the founding chamber’s water source dries up.
