223 replies to this topic

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Not a lot going on here to report. The Queen is back on egg laying again and the colony seems to be doing well. She never swells but keeps a steady pace up for months on end, then takes a 3-6 week break. Not sure on how long she pauses, but both times the brood pile will shrink down to maybe 4-6 late stage larvae/pupae before I notice more starting to show up again.

The trash pile during such times turns into mostly dead ants, kind’a gross, but for as big as the pile of dead gets you can’t really tell the colony has shrunk in numbers.

 

Here they had two clutches next to each other. One on the wall above, one on the mesh of the water tower below it.

 

up next to the top glass

 

on the mesh below

Edited by Full_Frontal_Yeti, March 12 2025 - 11:12 AM.

[OwlThatLikesAnts]

Has there been any more special ants like Meg the MutANT?

[AntsCali098]

I've always wanted to raise a big colony of Pogonomyrmex, but they always end up dying after nanitics for some reason unknown to me. I'll try again this year, as P.californicus is very easy to catch in my area. You seem to have a very long lasting colony. Do you have any tips for the genus? What seeds do you use to feed them?

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Has there been any more special ants like Meg the MutANT?

Nope. I did spot one ant with just one antenna a few months back. But by then the colony was so big i lost track of them quickly and have not spotted them again sense.
As they had one still, they were behaving as a normal ant and just blended into the crowd. So i can't say if they were born lacking one or if they lost it.

Meg was easy to spot even after the colony stared getting thicker. She was just a little bigger than typical and behaved oddly, sense she simply couldn't "hear" the other ants to follow their group behaviors. So even when there were a good number of ants, she stood out as easy to spot.

 

 

I've always wanted to raise a big colony of Pogonomyrmex, but they always end up dying after nanitics for some reason unknown to me. I'll try again this year, as P.californicus is very easy to catch in my area. You seem to have a very long lasting colony. Do you have any tips for the genus? What seeds do you use to feed them?

I got them as a 20+ founded colony from TarHeelAnts. From all my reading i'd estimate founding of this species fails 80-90% of the time even under the best conditions. Suggesting potentially weak genetics in some way if they fail so commonly even under optimal predator free conditions.


I'd point out that someone posting here has had good sucess doing simple dirt based founding setups and provided a thread of their findings.
However as far as i can figure TarHeelAnts does his as tube and tubes, and he's doing this at a commercial scale offering founded colonies practically year round.

I been feeding them a wide variety of seeds, a bulk of which is dandelion and kentucky blue grass which i bought from THA. I also pick up poppy, chia, flax and whatever else seems small enough for them from the bulk isle.
And some kind of insect feeder/fish flake/meat (about once a week or less depending on the size of the brood pile). I make sure to let them keep a bit of a larder of seeds as they would in the wild, but only give them more proteins once they are mostly done with the last bits i gave them.

I've always made sure to have some gradient of heat for them, even in a mini hearth i kept heat to one side.
While it is overkill for a lot of keepers, i've loved using a thermostat to automate nest temp control. And now that it is expanded to multiple nests I'm better able to mimic the conditions of getting a consistent year round temp deeper under ground.
With the "top" of the nest heated in parts to the mid/high 80s(f), and they keep the brood mostly in this nest. While the "lowest" part of the nest a constant 71f/72f. The Queen has taken up residence in a chamber there and rarely leaves.


And the only thing i've done that's fairly side of bell as far as i can tell, is give them a lot of outworld. Like a whole whole lot more outworld relative to the colony size, compare to what i see commonly. When they were just in the 20+ size in a minihearth, i also hooked up the otuworld from a fallenfortress, quadrupling their outworld space compared to the mninhearth alone. And i've always kept it this way with as much outworld space as i can manage for them. They take full advantage, even from day one they kept their trash pile as far from the nest entrance as they could go with it.
The main outworld being detached has also meant overall less nest disturbance, as all the feeding and cleaning done there never disturbs the nest enough to stress them out.
 

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

OMG the queen is laying eggs like a machine right now. I so wish i could get a good pic of these egg piles but the macro is about 1/2mm too short a focus to the bottom of the nest.
I had generally estimated she drops 5-10 a day or so in a fairly steady pace.

 

In the two years I've had them i have never once seen a lone egg by itself. They are tiny, and when held as a single by a worker, can't be seen from overhead.
I only ever see them as part of clutches. I've seen some very small clutches of just 5-8 eggs, but never singles.

 

Until now, and now I've seen singles at least the last 3/4 of the look ins over the last 3 days(which is many, they sit right next to me).
And the egg pile/s are massive now compared to what i'm used to seeing with a spread of egg clutches to larva flowers.

Some of the look ins she has had one or two single eggs just stuck on her gaster at arbitrary spots. Like she was pumping em out so fast they just went where ever and some wound up stuck on her. Eventually a worker came and took them.

But the odds have changed too drastically on this, it's crazy. From two years of not seeing a lone egg, to now seeing one or two singles near her most of the time i go check in on em.
And this massive egg pile.

 

I bet alates are on the way. This is the 3rd "fresh start" egg pile I've seen, and it's way bigger than the first two which grew at a more steady rate.
So i'm a predict alates now on that sign.

[ANTdrew]

That’s a safe bet at this point.

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Still working on a new nest, but the brood is now everywhere. The queen continues to pump out eggs fast enough I see a single one from time to time, and anytime day or night it seems.
They keep brood now in all the water towers except the one right by the nest entrance. They almost never keep any brood in the chamber even tough it is a water tower and all the rest have plenty of brood on them.

 

Here’s the oldest nest, first one I made that worked. Need to dust it off badly.
This is the “bottom” of the nest where temps are  kept at 71/21f all the time. Except when the ambient gets hotter of course, no cooling. The queen used to live in this nest most of the time, but recently spent a while in the large first nest, and now has been in the middle nest for the last week.


 

The next two images are the middle nest also newest nest. It shares a little bit of heat cable with the “top” hottest nest, and has no temp probe in it. But with a surface IR temp reader I estimate average internal temps to be in the mid to high 70s.

There’s our Queen in her current chamber where she’s been for most of this week. She can be seen in the image of the first chamber too.

 

And here’s the “top” of the mound brood piles, using a temp probe/thermostat setup temps in here are in the mid to high 80s. I note that after the move they stopped using the dry hot chambers at the top of the nest. Which they used to keep late stage brood at. But now they keep them in this  watertower and only occasionally move some of the pupae over to the hottest chambers.

 

 

Whole setup. The new nest will push the middle nest back on the shelf filling the spot where it sits now. Connecting to it with those two ports we can see on the front face now. Images above are in proper order of nests/chambers going from left to right in the whole setup image here.

 

 

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Still no progress on the next nest. Two steps forward, two steps back and start over. And I need to get on the stick as we are thick with ants here these days. The little bits of paper wad in some images are a bit of paper-towel with some sunburst on it.

 

 

 

 

 

The brood pile is back to being a real pile and new groups of ants are waking up almost  daily again.
They have even started keeping some brood in the first chamber by the nest exit which they had not done until just recently seen here on the right.

 

Middle nest

And bottom nest.

 

 

However the real post here is about an unwanted guest that took up residence in the outworld. Now my 2nd one to have happened.
We let the cellar spiders live in the home around us normally. They typically stay up out of the way while removing other bugs, and we leave them alone. But this one had to be moved, though I did let them finish their meal before eviction.

 

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Finally got the nest done, and I still made mistakes. This one was the 4th and lacks the copper heat pipe that I just forgot to put in before the pour. I really should consider a check list, but that feels like work and I’m a slacker. I just whiffed one fully, then forgot to put magnets in one, then dropped one, after getting a glass cut for it.

So here now on the 4th one and they moved in ASAP, filling it with brood as I had and had not imagined.
These are phone imagines, I’ll rig up some better lighting and bust out the real camera soon for some beauty images with no heat cables.

Before:

This had to come apart, with the left nest off first, and then the middle one.
It was real stressful work as the colony is packed in there enough they just pour out of any hole I open like water, and the queen was currently in that last nest. So I needed to keep real close track of where she was to ensure she’d not A: fall out of the nest, or B: Get smooshed at a port hole when i’m trying to jam a tube into it. Fortunately she quickly moved into the next nest  over when I started to disturb the nest. And then again when I started to disturb the middle nest.
So the queen moved all the way into the first big nest and was still there this morning.


Here is the new nest.

I wanted to provide as much flat space as I could, seeing them want to spread feeding larvae out next to each other rather than kept in piles as the non-feeding larvae and pupae are. I also made this one shallower than the previous ones. i noticed the depth was just a couple mm too far awawy from my macro lense to focus on. You can spot a couple smoother/odd spots inside on the back left area. I had a little sand collapse and needed to enlarge the tunnel space a little.

And here it is in place


And just after getting it al hooked up:

 

Here is blurry bad shot from this morning: They have filled all the spaces in the new nest with brood. I had imagined they would use the water tower room, but not all the rest of ti too, including the hall ways.


Here is the full shot from this moring, you can see the other nest chambers far left and top,  where they used to keep brood have been mostly emptied. The first two chambers in the large first nest have also been mostly emptied of feeding brood now holding the eggs, tinyween larve still in flowers, and waking callows. And the pupae are in the big nest on a chamber right over the heat pipe back left side you can see the pile of white and yellow/orange.



Here in the largest nest where the queen moved to sense the remodeling, we can see both her and the serious pile of callows going on there. From just ecloased whitish yellow in the middle to all the light golden orange ones around the edge. I think they have reached a new production rate level. I assume we’ll see alates sometime this year out of them.

 

[Ernteameise]

I just love watching this colony grow.

You are doing a great job.

And they are really pretty.

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Here are a few nicer images of the setup with new nest on the good camera. I've removed the heat cabel from most of the nests for the pics.

 

Full setup with new nest in the middle looking busy. They quickly shrank from the other two nests to fill the middle one in within a day. They still use the other two but as seen they are far less busy/crowded than they used to be.

I've been giving them bits of papertowel wet with sunburst. They tear bits off and feed it to the some of the larvea.



The oldest nest, where a small handful of brood are still consistently kept.

 

The 3rd made double heat chambers which had been full of brood, now mostly empty.

 

The original large nest still acting as “top of the mound” first nest off the outworld. They move the brood pile back and forth during the day between the hottest parts in the back where the copper tube runs just under all those chambers. And the water towers  where they will stuff the whole pile into one chamber with just enough room for workers to fit between the glass and top of the pile.

 

 

 

And finally close ups of the new nest being put to serious use. I think I left the “halls” just a little bit too wide as they tend to store brood in them, while narrower halls won’t see brood or seeds left in them. I also think they like the smaller chambers that are about ½ or so as tall as the other nests I’ve made. I had noticed they like to lay the feeding larvae out flat next to each other not piled up. So this nest was made to maximize flat internal surface areas for them and they sure do put it to use.

 

 

 

 

A growth explosion is happening, you can see the number of callows from the last few days is crazy.

 

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

I posted about the new mutAnt in general that showed up in the colony. It was ID'd as a gynandromorph/Gynandromorphism.
Managed to get some better images and wanted to post them to the journal.

I have been keeping it in a test tube as i'm fairly sure it will either be culled by the colony, or run itself to death trying to climb up and fly off.
It is quite clumsy compared to the rest of them, i imagine the a-symmetry of the one wing and such throws it off a bit. When loose in the outorld it just climbs and falls climbs and falls climbs and falls endlessly. So i got it in a test tube with a little water and sunburst and i guess i'll let it live out it's days there for what, the next 6-12 months i guess?
 

I know a kid that collects and displays dead insects, so i think once it's dead i'll pass it on to them.

                

 

          

 

 

 

I think the wobbly nature of the line is interesting, as a lot of gynandromorphs are a full 50/50 split, eitehr going front/back or left/right.
While this one seems clearly a left/right split, it's not a full 50/50 pair of halves. The side showing male traits is not full male black but has a wobbly curvey line on that side of its body where the red coloring female trait and the black coloring male trait meet. Raher than meeting right in the middle with the male side being fully black as one would be.
You can also see that on that side, portions of the leg segmetns are black whle other portiosn are very red.

Here's an image of the one male alate this colony has produced for comparrison.


You can also spot the more curvy nature of the male anttena here on this one, that the gynandromorph has on that one side of its body too.

Edited by Full_Frontal_Yeti, July 24 2025 - 10:51 AM.

[Ernteameise]

As I wrote in the other thread, this is AMAZING.

Thank you for sharing. 

My mind is blown. 

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

A while back i had mentioned the Queen is seen with an egg stuck on her from time to time. Like she just laid it but somehow it winds up on her gaster somewhere for a while before a worker takes it.
I managed to get an image of this yesterday. image is a little fuzzy as i was taking it throgh a 10x magnifying glass. My nests are just a tiny bit too deep to get a good macro shot.




You can see the tiny white blob/bump on her side there. It's not uncommon these days to spot that going on. Though i have never seen the brood pile grow larger than X. It tends to get to a size and then plateaus. 
 

[Ernteameise]

This is very interesting.

I have never seen this in any of my colonies, however, in my largest colony, I am not sure I will ever see the queen again in the mass of ants, even less any eggs stuck to her. 

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

Nothing much happening round here, thankfully.
Ants doing great. Queen did take a brief break on eggs, but as from the last post is back on again. I suspect she took maybe two-three weeks off. The brood pile was shrinking but i'd already spotted the eggs before it got down to half even.

 

They are starting to look like i'll need to make another nest space soon. Top down is a nice view, but it is also low efficacy on footprint/nest space ratio. I plan the next two will be vertical style nests, and then that'll have filled up all the space i have here to give them. 
 

Here's a few shots of their outworld(only one at the moment) right after a resupply of water, nectar, and cat* food. They always mob up on everything new even just water dispensers.


I do have to act as lifegaurd on the open dish of sugerwater/sunburst. It's too shallow for them to drown but as the nectar dries out they can get trapped in it. So i add water to the dish regualry over time as it is drying out to try and keep them from getting stuck. I do have to rescue one form time ot time  if they get trapped overnight.

 

 

The pile of cat* food will last them a week+. It's something all the ants of the nest will partake in. They get globs of it and form groups around a glob drinking up the watery meat juice(it's very dry after so long in the freezer, i add water). They then take the blobs after they are done drinking on them and attach them to the larvae who eat the rest.
No trash at all, I dig on the no mess foods.

 

 

 

 

 

*catfood: not typical canned cat food but some stupid costly stuff my friend's cats turned their noses up at. It shipps as cold perishable and has to be kept frozen or spoils quickly like most meat. It is basiaclly various brid parts we do not eat, turned into a slurry. It is near people gade food called "smooth bird."

Edited by Full_Frontal_Yeti, September 9 2025 - 9:20 AM.

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

One thing I find myself taking pride in, is the ants using the nests exactly as I had designed intended/imagined them. The chambers and passages are not done generically /samey, but with specific use intent imagined for them. This has been an evolving process as I watch their use and make plans based on that when expanding. They will just make due as best they can with what you give them. But what they have to work with has observable influences on their behaviors. You wouldn’t know they did all this unless they could show you.

 

here's the setup overall:

Some chambers are where I imagined brood care happens most, and other chambers where brood warming happens. Late stage brood are no longer feeding as they pupate, and benefit from heat most during this state. They are kept separate from the active feeding brood who are more commonly kept in slightly cooler and more humid areas.

 

 

 

Along the bottom are the towers where some feeding brood may be found, and the pupae pile will be sometimes.
While along the top are the hot chambers where pupae are warmed, and seeds used to be stored. The red circles are where the pupae pile is currently and the hot spot they are shuffled between.
The green circle shows their "staging" area. Whenever there is fresh food to forage, most of it is dumped here by the ants bringing it back into the nest, and moved deeper into the nest by other ants over time.
This big first nest tends to have the lowest population density, though can get very busy during foraging. And all the ants that hangout in this nest but don't do brood care, are the ones who will aggressively rush out of the nest to get all chompy stingy on fools if there are any disturbances.

The first nest i made, planned as a feeding brood care place it remains possibly the most popular nest by average population, they really like to pack in there.

The next brood care nest was also a double chamber heart towers one. Hearts are cool, and the ants seem to think so too, this is the next most popular place to be in the nest complex. Also where the queen is found most often thee days. though she does move a round a little and is found in most of the "lower" nest areas at some point. She avoids the "top" nest except when i overly disturb the "lower" ones for some reason.

 

 

The most recent nest is my big pride one where i planned for a better seed larder (less hot, less humid), and they used it, this is where all seeds are longer term stored now. The old larder areas is where fruit goes to dry.

 

 

And the new brood care chamber got a whole lot more usable floor space than the previous ones. Because they like to keep a "working" pile of seeds in a more humid area to help them be easier to open. They tried to keep some in the old tower chambers but those had so little floor space and it seemed clear it wasn't an optimal space layout for certain needs of sharing the humid chamber space between brood and some seeds they want to loosen up.
And it is exactly what they do wiht it, brood on the tower, small seed pile being worked off to the side.

 

[ANTdrew]

You should definitely read this book:
https://www.bing.com...3JvdW5kX05lc3Rz
Tschinkel does most of his experiments on Pogonomyrmex ants, so you’d get good insights into how they use chambers and plan their nests.

[Ernteameise]

Great report about colony organization!

Very exciting. 

I also recommend Tschinkel's book- I have it on my Kindle, I started reading it, but have not yet finished....

[Full_Frontal_Yeti]

New nest expansion has happened.

This time I went vertical as I am running out of space around here. I have been doing top down view nests, but those give a lot less realestate for the ants to the realestate it fills on the shelf. I’m down to two empty spots, these will get vertical nests. Though from the look of the newest one it will be about a year before I would need to add more.

The nest has one specific new feature, under glass heating that also warms the glass directly.

 

One of the ongoing challenges of some ants is condensation on the nest glass.

Warm humid air in the nest, contacts the glass, which itself as a material cools rapidly, and is exposed to the outside air where it can get a lot colder than in the heated nest. Creating perfect conditions for condensation. It blocks view and most ants do not like open wet water in their nest space. Many of ants will use the moisture on the glass and build dirt walls to keep the light out which blocks up our view.
The best way to prevent or remove condensation is to ensure a heat source is in direct contact with the glass so the glass itself never gets too cold*. It does not need to be a lot of heat, just enough be like the car defogger, keep the glass just warm enough to prevent the forming of condensation in the first place. And drying out any that may have already formed.

 

 

Construction details:

This is the work bench I use and do the work on a larger sheet of glass.  I already had a cut piece of museum glass to use and it was the right size. So the nest is sized for it rather than made what I want and cut glass to fit. The black line is the trace to the glass so I know what is inside/outside the glass cover.


I had wanted to pour around the heat cable so it would be a perfect fit. I tried supergluing the cable down to the glass as superglue is so watery thin I figured it would be the least intrusive options.
However not wanting to cut the useable cable up, the bendy nature of it and the weight of it caused enough flex. It would not stay down in place and at the last before pouring I gave up on that plan and removed them fully.


Always trying to get thinner walls, the green clay is place holder/sand block. The plan was to remove the green clay right before pouring. So I would have a fairly thin wall space and no sand needing to be cleaned out of a tiny tight space. But as I did not pour around the cable it was all for not.


Making empty spaces below the sand was one of the harder parts of this build.
This is what will be passage between the floors.

 

And this is the water tower in the bottom floor. With the green clay being a window into the tower for checking water levels.

 

And then I used the Dremel to cut channels of the heat cable. I had planned on 3 runs but the top was a little tight to be under the magnets and I think these two will be plenty as I want the heat in the top and cooler in the bottom.

I poured a little too fast and let the mix be a little too thick(I add a little more water than 1:3 typcaily). I trapped an air buble right there in the bottom chamber on the watertower, and created a gap that i had to fill in later which  you can see.

 

BAM

 

Heat cable puts heat inside the nest AND on the glass at the same time. The heat transfer and retention will not be as good an efficiency as the copper heat pipe. But in one cable run we get both better nest heating efficiency compared to heating externally where a lot of the heat is just going off into the room. And we get the contact with the glass which should keep the condensation at bay too.

 

 

Though at time of post the nest has heavy condensation on the top three floors. This is normal for a new nest that still has a lot of water in the nest block from both plater mix and all the washing out later. Typically this will clear up in about 3-5 days as the nest block dries out.

 

And as any of you might imagine, yes there is one down side to this setup. That cable is locked in there now, to get it out would need to remove the glass, that is going ot be a fixed feature of dealing with this nest for as long as I have it. As well if I pulled the cable wrong it would pop the glass off. Though that nis part of the point of having a very form fitting tight channel. That should hold it in place and not allow any tugs on the cable in X direction to transfer any of that force onto the glass. The cable would have to be tugged very specifically outward away from the glass to do so. Any other angel of yank would be held in place and not allowed to twist/move and prevent force transfer.

 

 

Just put it in place yesterday so we’ll see how it all lands out in a week or so. Here are the opening images, including the little path i had to create for getting in there. Space on the shelf is fixed, not rearanging all this so things got to fit where and how they can. Two bits of brass water pipe connections, a T and a 90 elbow. The elbow uses a little blutak and fits snugly into the nest port directly. The T had to be cut down and uses a bit of larger tube as a collar to connect the brass and smaller nest ports. The two nests now connect directly in that new tunnel to the new nest.

 

And how it all sits together now

 

 

 

*It is not a specific temperature to be at, it is more about the difference between the nest air temps and the temps of the glass. If difference > X, condensation will form. Keeping the glass just slightly warmed prevents that.

Edited by Full_Frontal_Yeti, November 10 2025 - 9:23 AM.