10 replies to this topic

[dermy]

I finally got an ant colony after all mine died last year. It's nothing to special, just a single queen (for now I do plan to go back and get more of the colony later) and around 100 ish Workers.
The actual colony was pretty large and I assume has many queens that are hidden deep within the nest. The ground was sort of clay underneath the first few inches so it became very hard to get anywhere.

I put a rock ontop of it so I'm hoping to trick them into going up near the surface come the heat of the mid-day so I can just flip the rock over and collect more of the Colony.

Here's a video of the colony outside:



I still haven't set them up into anything yet but I will make another video on that later.

[dermy]

I finally got them semi-setup in something now. i still haven't gotten the amount of workers I need to feel comfortable with taking the colony.

 

 

[I really hate that youtube got rid of the one feature I used, the video editor tool that would let you put a lot of your videos together into one video, I'm stuck doing it manually and unless I want it to take hours to upload it has to be in 720p I can't even watch it half the time in 720p because of my internet]

 

[Also an interesting note about my internet and stuff, apparently youtube videos in 360p-480p will play perfect with no interruptions. But anything 720p and higher "should expect to see some playback issues"]

 

 

I'll post another update sometime when it stops raining and I can get more workers and stuff.

[dermy]

I have revised the setup, added more areas [mainly foraging areas] and given them overall more space. I'll likely need to add in another bigger nesting area eventually, just have to be careful with the amount of connections.

 

 

As you can tell there is a ton of workers in this colony

 

 

And as is tradition, here's a nice timelapse [actually perhaps one of my longest ant related time-lapses I've done]

Edited by dermy, May 7 2018 - 2:00 PM.

[Karma]

Would you happen to have any experience with mites? 

 

I recently caught 3 blackish brown myrmica queens, they are in their founding stage and have a lot of brood however one of them has mites. I do not know if the mites are parasitic or not but since they are just in a test tube offering orange juice or lemon juice on some  cotton isn't doing much sadly. Just curious if you have done anything in the past that has worked to get rid of them if you have had to deal with them?

[dermy]

I haven't had any problems with mites sorry. I will tell you that I am one of many who does not believe in the "lemon theory" thing. The best I can say is keep an eye on them, if they are parasitic mites they will likely kill the ants quickly [I'm sorry there's not much I know what to do with mites ] if not then they aren't parasitic and are probably just a nuisance. If you want I would try to relocate the colony into some different setup if they get out of hand and see if the added space helps.

[Karma]

I haven't had any problems with mites sorry. I will tell you that I am one of many who does not believe in the "lemon theory" thing. The best I can say is keep an eye on them, if they are parasitic mites they will likely kill the ants quickly [I'm sorry there's not much I know what to do with mites ] if not then they aren't parasitic and are probably just a nuisance. If you want I would try to relocate the colony into some different setup if they get out of hand and see if the added space helps.

Hmm okay, I'll definitely move them as soon as I can,  probably when the first workers arrive soon.  Thank you though! Crossing my fingers.

[dermy]

Just a quick update on the colony, I'll be collecting what I can before they are cement poured and dead.

 

 

Edit: Here's a larger Time-Lapse I've made of them, at around 9mins: [It's 9hrs time-lapsed by 64x]

Edited by dermy, May 18 2018 - 9:58 PM.

[dermy]

Here's a video from early May showing you how many workers there are, this video was not time-lapsed like the others, I noticed they didn't need to be sped up since they were already pretty fast.

[dermy]

One of my Camponotus herculeanus queens died, and another one refused to lay eggs after 20 days and never removed the wings so I fed them both off to this massive Myrmica colony:

 

I've been meaning to fine-tune their current setup so it's still a Work in Progress.

 

 

Spoiler

Fun fact, besides my Colony of Myrmica from last year this is the longest I've had a colony that didn't get killed

Edited by dermy, May 28 2018 - 11:41 PM.

[dermy]

Welp this colony did indeed get messed with, so I was forced to move them out of their big bin into the other one again.

Here's a video of the colony [timelapsed of course] digging in their new home, as you can tell I was able to save quite a bit of the colony, and around 6 of the 8 queens.

Spoiler

OT and yes I have uploaded 5,000 videos to that one channel.....

[dermy]

This colony is doing wonderful. I'm amazed as to how well they've bounced back from the recent tragedy.
Here's a video of me during a routine clean up:




I don't do these sort of cleanups often but I fed them some watermelon that they just covered up and it was starting
to get nasty and needed to be cleaned out or it would risk serious molding. I also removed some old plastic from freeze pops
that I give them every now and then. I'm amazed at how big the population is and expect them to possibly make alates this year.
Since they are in a sand setup and I don't dig around [you couldn't anyway they'd be all over you in seconds] I have no way of
knowing if they have any brood that will devolop into alates or not.