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[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Glad to report the colony is ticking over same as always.

The slight down time in brood that needed to be fed, resulted in a slow to grow trash pile with little to no seed husks to discard. And while nothing seemingly bad is going on, there’s so many ants now, that a new trash piled of just dead ants formed anyway.  And got noticable.

It is starting to be buried under seed husks now, but it was kind a gross for a week of watching the dead ants just pile up.
But now there’s brood everywhere, with all the little baskets laid out on all the water tower space there is. Still just larvae though, no pupae yet being kept in the hot spots. I see one or two that’ll be official pupae in the next day or two.

 

Here’s the long foil bit they got form the small to med outworld. It’s taken them a full week or so to get lined up with the port to go to the trash pile in the large outworld. This will likely be there later today.

 

And here’s a “Smooth fish” feeding going on.

 

They really swarm the stuff, and it’ll all be ate in just a couple to few days, leaving no refuse behind to rot.

 

I love the no mess foods, but they still get some cricket or waxworms from time to time too. I figure some amount of natural variety is generally best for them so I don’t go all in on one food source.

 

And here's some ant keeper feed i recommend:

 

 

[ANTdrew]

Now that’s some nice nectar!

[NotAxo]

Seems like the you've got a special ‘ant-idote’ for a long day 

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

And the colony carries on. They seem to be doing very well, and get a lot more active as the temps rise around here. Once ambient is at 85f or more they are very active and busy in the outworld. And they move a lot faster in general with higher temps.

 

The colony seems to  have hit a death/birth equilibrium. There are dead ants daily. The trash pile will be just dead ants for a bit after I vacuum it out. But for all the dead ants, the colony size never shrinks, it just very slowly grows now. I estimate a 1.1-1.3/1   birth/death ratio. So the colony grows, but with the total size large enough now, the visible growth to notice is very slow.
As well it took a while for the ants to age and start dying, so opening growth seemed very fast without the old age death rate cutting into it early on.

I’ve heard from Mack and hope to get my new outworld sometime before Christmas, but I’m not holding my breath. I was surprised he was even able to be operating already/still, and with more  hurricane on the way I’m just going to have to be patient. Hope he and the  box maker business he works with are safe and dry. And cross my fingers to also hope I get what I want sooner than later.

 

Still managed to not be stung yet, which I’m personally surprised by for how many times I wind up with them crawling on me while I’m working in their space. They are generally fast to bite/sting anything, like it’s just how they say “what’s this?” to anything new around them. But my luck is holding.

 

Here's a few snaps. Anytime i do a full fresh up on their stuff they go swarm on everything.
they had water and nectar just 10 min ago, but they act all starved out like they hadn’t had any of this in days when a full fresh’n up happens.

 

 

 

 

Here we can see that they get attracted to sunlight. During certain times of day when a strip of sun shines direct onto the outworld, the ants will congregate in it.

And yeah that outworld is looking a bit nasty, I got a new one in the pipe already, but all I can do is wait now.

 

 

Last we see an unwelcomed visitor moved into the med outworld. I didn’t spot the spider until I took the lid off to do water dispensers. They were clearly eyeing the ants as a possible meal but likely also dangerous. They were slow and amenable to getting in the bug cup for eviction. I wondered if they had already been stung a bit maybe.

Edited by Full_Frontal_Yeti, October 10 2024 - 12:38 PM.

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

I believe the colony(Queen) has an on/off cycle of a few months. The brood pile grows for a while, stabilizes, and then slowly shrinks. Then begins to grow again to repeat this cycle. She clearly takes some time off from laying eggs every so often. But the colony as a whole never seems to slow down. And only grow in terms of adult ants running around. For as many dead ants as the trash pile grows by, the colony never seems to be shrinking just growing.

 

I found an interesting behavior related to sugar water. I put out open feeding dishes of Sunburst from time to time along side the usual liquid feeders. And as the sugar water dries out it gets sticky/solid. So I just squirt a little water into the dish. This lasts for a few days, adding a squirt each day. But during this time the ants will start to put dirt into the tray. Packing it in, then digging it all out and taking it back to the nest. Like some kind of longer term storage of the sugar/way to get it back to ants that don’t leave the nest?

This is a recently dug out sugar water dish.


Here they are in the first staging area where they bring the sugar mud slurry.


They pack it into little lumps and stash these in the nest.
They never seem to keep a big larder of this stuff in nest, but go through it fairly quickly with the chambers it was stored in being empty again within 2-5 days or so depending on the amount.
 

 

I been using nestmates as outworld water dispensers for a while now they work great.

 

But they do go through water kind of fast these days. And I wanted something that would not only  hold more water but  not need to be in a specific bubbles need to go up orientation. As well I just can’t bring myself to pay so much for the little 3d printed plastic bits used on tiny glass jars. It’s like $16 just for two, I spent a little less than that total and got a box of 30 lidded glass jars and the blue sponge corks for them.
So now I’m using these as water dispensers.

 

 

The only oddity to them is they normally suck the cork inside past the bottle neck over time, but it’s not really a problem. I can just pull the stopper back out a little if needed, but typically it's not an issue. I’d recommend them for any larger colony that drinks a lot of water
If you already got them around, plain old test tubes work great like this too, but might be kind of large for some outworlds.

Lastly got word from THA that the outworld progress is happening. So I’m making another nest expansion now, and will have the big rearrange here in the next couple weeks to be ready for it.

Edited by Full_Frontal_Yeti, November 8 2024 - 9:38 AM.

[jabasson]

Something else you can try as well is to just add paper towel and put the lid on around it. UtahAnts showed me this and it works great for my sugar feeders for my Myrmecocystus. https://www.formicul...-liquid-feeder/

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Watching the brood pile slowly shrink right now and waiting for the next new egg clutch/larvae bloom to be seen. I imagine maybe another week or so. Last time the brood pile got down to the last group of workers to eclose before i spotted the signs she was laying again.
 

Thanks for the reminder about that paper towel method for water dispensers. They work great and as long as I keep the paper trim small, the water lasts longer(lower evaporation rate) than with the blue stoppers. And yeah i got that fancy Dutch angle shot for those.

 

 

 

 

 

Still playing with the foil, it keeps them busy.

 

 

 

As I had mentioned the trash pile gets a heavier dead ants ratio to it at times. With the brood pile shrinking they produce less husk trash, so the dead ants become more obvious. Though for all that die the colony whole seems to mostly be growing.

Got the next nest expansion made, this took one toss out to get to.

 

 

It has four ports, one on each short side and two on one long side.  And i'll clean up the edges with my dremmel later. Though it sits so flat already, i'm not going to mess with the bottom edges and leave them as is.
In this close up you can see the three dark areas where the ports come up into the connecting tunnel space from lower down on the nest block.


Yeah heart shapes, cause hearts are cool.

 

I was a bit too distracted on the first pour and build so it didn’t turn out useful. I kind of just wanted to copy my first one as that nest is the popular place for all the hip ants to hang out. It is just two slightly large chambers with water towers and a bit of connecting tunnel. I’ll stop by the frame shop latter today to get a museum glass top cut for it. It’s not a perfectly squared shape so the glass will wind up hanging off a little on a couple edges. My work is not just good, it’s good enough.
 

I’m going to make some paper cut outs of all the nests with the connection ports drawn on so I can work out how I’ll arrange it all first. Before I tear up their world and stress them all out for a few hours when this rearrange actually happens.

Edited by Full_Frontal_Yeti, November 15 2024 - 9:59 AM.

[ANTdrew]

That looks cool.