2 replies to this topic

[Jonah462947]

Hey everyone

Possibly three or four months ago I caught a queen ant in my garage. This was actually the first queen ant I had ever caught. I put her in a test tube set up and let her sit for around a month and a half. Then she actually started laying eggs. Everything was going really well for a while, I had around ten workers in the colony. Then I moved back to college and the workers started dying off. After I lost about five workers in the span of two days my queen stopped laying eggs. I decided I was obviously doing something wrong, so I left the test tube setup open outside and released the ants in the same spot I caught the queen.

Here's the thing, I would really like to keep pet ants. So I would appreciate if anyone could shed some light on what I was doing wrong.

I was feeding daily with little pieces of meat. There were two test tubes attached to their living space with water because I noticed the cotton in one of the water test tubes had this brown tint to it (I'm assuming mold). And that's pretty much it.

Any help would be appreciated.

[ANTdrew]

Which species? What temperature were they kept at? Insect protein is necessary for ants to thrive, so that might have been the issue.

[TestSubjectOne]

You should feed ants protein in the form of meat or insects, water and sugar water or honey for carbohydrates. From your description it seems like you weren't doing the last.