Update 11-7-2019
I still have both colonies, but the one in the vertical prototype formicarium is not doing well. It's been losing workers like crazy. I'm not sure what's going on, but every time I look at it, there is a pile of dead workers in the foraging area.
You can see piles of dead workers here. I've probably lost 75% of the colony by now. It's down to about 200 workers, and pretty much all the repletes are gone.
I'm guessing maybe the black mold that has been growing inside the nest over the years might have something to do with it.
Even though tons of workers are dying, the queen still continues to produce like crazy.
For the first time with this colony, I decided to clean out the nest in hopes that this will stop the colony from dying.
I dumped them all in this tub while I cleaned the nest out.
Here's the nest all cleaned up. The only thing left now are are few small permanent stains.
While I was at it, I upgraded the foraging area by replacing the Hydrostone floor with the sand-covered resin I use in all my starter formicariums.
I dumped the colony back into the formicarium, but the weird thing is it's been three days and they are still all sitting in the same place; none of them have moved back into the nest yet. I'm thinking there might be something wrong with this colony. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
There is good news though. The biggest colony housed in the giant vase setup is producing like CRAZY again, and there are almost no deaths at all now.
Here are a few new pictures of them. You can see how perfectly clear the glass is on their chambers. At the moment a few had some condensation, but there is almost no dirt on them at all.
They keep all the cocoons in the top chamber just below the surface where it's dry.
Way deep down you can find the queen.
This is probably going to be a third personal colony of these I'll be keeping. It started as an experiment to see how deep the queen would dig, but I waited so long before putting her in here that she just didn't feel like digging much anymore. It took her days to finally dig a shallow nest. She survived though, and actually produced a lot of workers.
Once the workers finally made their way out of the nest, the digging started. They now have dug a few chambers and have gone down pretty deep.