I recently started feeding my Camponotus sansabeanus colony fruit flies. At the time hey had about four or five larvae. They really seem to like the fruit flies and the queen subsequently produced 10-15 eggs. So I keep feeding them the fruit flies at a pretty regular basis. The original larvae all cocooned up except one. That one just kept getting bigger until it was about 50% larger than any of the other larvae had gotten. I thought this was pretty interesting and looking forward to what it might become.
Then the other night it looked like the workers and the queen were cleaning it and the next morning I woke up and it was deflated. It's not dead, it still squirms around a bit and it still has a little food left inside of it, but it's lost most of it's volume. I'm wondering if anyone could tell me what was going on. Was the colony just using this one larva as a storage vessel for the extra food?
Edited by john.harrold, March 15 2016 - 3:11 PM.
