I know, I know, this is a pest species but I got the opportunity to get a colony so I took it. About a month ago, my dad got a little planter with a couple tropical plants in it. I quickly noticed before the planter were transferred into our garden that there were loads of little black ants walking all around the pot of plants. I realized these were L.humile, and since they are not present around my house yet, I was not going to let that change. I got permission to flood the pot, and the ants quickly evacuated onto the leaves above. I used my aspirator to suck up about 1,500 workers and 5 queens, and then sprayed the rest of the ants down with Raid and watered it into the soil to kill any remaining queens. So now I have a colony of Linepithema humile with five queens.
I decided that I would use two layers of fluon and a moat of dish soap-water to contain the colony. It took them about three days to get through both layers of fluon- one vertical layer and one upside down layer and they got to the soap-water. Well once they got to the soap-water they had a mas suicide, with about 100-200 workers jumping into the water and drowning. They got smarter than that after that, and stopped leaping into the death liquid.
As of now, the colony has 200-300 eggs, so they should make a full population recovery from the mass suicides in about a month.
Pictures of the colony on Day 1 of captivity.
Edited by Gregory2455, February 20 2019 - 10:07 PM.