24 replies to this topic

[YsTheAnt]

Jealous!!

[YsTheAnt]

Did you raise them from a single queen, or catch the original queen and her six workers?

[LC3]

Did you raise them from a single queen, or catch the original queen and her six workers?

Single queen. 

 Probably late June, 2015. 

[YsTheAnt]

How are they doing?

[LC3]

How are they doing?

 

They just went back to not having larvae develop again.

 

I actually never realized how many workers this colony has. I counted 191 in this picture, but the minors die easily and they aren't getting replenished so probably closer to 185 en average. 

 

 

185 ants in two tubes I dumped into a bucket. Not the smartest thing I've done

 

March 16th, 2018

 

June 6th,2018

 

Anyways as mentioned above, the colonies main workforce and comprising probably like a little over half the colony are minors and medians, those tend to live for a few months en average. So as the colony stops producing brood (I think I counted something like 1 major brood for every 5-8 minor/median brood) they'll eventually die off. Some of these majors are definitely at least a year old, I think one of the largest majors in the colony was produced during the colonies 2nd year and I don't remember any majors dying. Still no major large enough to match that of a mature colony though. 

 

They're all fat and still eating but the brood has stopped developing for the most part, (down to 1-3 pupae per generation). The queen has also stopped laying eggs and her gaster has shrunk but other then that she's still fine and active. Prior to this the queen laid a ton of eggs and I think they've been living off of that one batch for a few weeks already. All the eggs developed into small larvae rather quickly but stopped there. It's around the time of the year I last put them into hibernation so I think this is maybe what they're preparing for.

Edited by LC3, June 3 2018 - 11:32 AM.