383 replies to this topic

[Serafine]

Update time!

 

Look at how cute they are!

 

There's now more ants in the water tube outpost than the entire colony had when they moved out.

 

 

 

Their outworld got a small upgrade - more shrimps tubes! They immediately came and examined them.

 

 

 

There's so many of them in the outworld now.

 

 

 

 

 

The old shrimp tubes now look really overcrowded during the night and the new ones already have a few inhabitants as well.

 

 

 

A few days ago they got living terfly again and they went absolutely berzerk on them.

It was interesting to watch how differently the majors and the smaller workers acted. While the medias and minors ran around in big circles before and after hitting a fly (the minors often did hit & run attacks, the medias usually grappled and didn't let go until the fly stopped moving) the majors' reactions were very different - they walked a few steps then turn around on the spot multiple times looking for threats, walked another few steps and repeated the process in a kind of stop-motion way. When they hit a fly it usually didn't move for much longer after the first attack, those major bites really hurt.

Here's two minors with slain terfly.

 

They were quite aggressive for the rest of the day and didn't really like any sort of fast movement or light sources nearby. Here's a major irritated by the red camera focus light. It's like "no pictures!" ^^

 

 

 

 

Here are some nest pictures. I tried plugging out the heating cable but they clearly don't want to hibernate - they actually started to move brood into the outworld (into the shrimp tubes) because the outworld is a bit closer to the heater and so a bit warmer than the unheated nest. After I plugged the heating cable back in there were these blobs of ants in the upper chambers enjoying the warmth. The queen is sitting right in the middle of the old nest as usual.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some people asked me how I clean up the outworld and all that garbage the ants produce at a staggering rate, here is the answer. A (slightly used) flat brush is perfect to pick up most of the stuff  - just put it vertically onto the garbage like a stamp and all the light debris will get stuck between the hair. You can then use a flat piece of paper to brush the stuff off into a plastic box. With some practice it's really easy to do, fast and efficient.

 

[Serafine]

And another update, this time on the Amber Family.

 

The little dumbnuts managed to dig into the water chamber.

 

Apparently they were trying to make the nest bigger so they got a completely new setup with additional test tubes.

 

The tube was quickly moved but then I had to relocate over 200 workers from the old setup using a small piece of paper to pick them up.

 

 

Finally they were all in the new box.

 

 

 

 

The new nest was quickly discovered.

 

The also got some food.

 

 

Then they started building a ramp at the entrance of the old nest.

 

 

Two days later this is what it looks like. They managed to not only build a ramp but a tunnel network spanning half of the box front area. And they managed to make BOTH Galileo feeders leak in the process by covering their entire bases with dirt

 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, March 11 2018 - 3:41 PM.

[Serafine]

They finally moved out of the tube, just after they finished off the water tank for good.




They're not in the new tubes though. So were the heck are they?


Look what they've done to the nest entrance. It's like a whole little hillside landscape - with lots of ants.






Aaand that's where they are. Yes, they've managed to create a multi-level ant nest in barely 2 centimeters of sand. And their box smells. Not sure if it's because of the leaked feeders, the garbage I can't remove or the deterrent they smear onto their food. These ants are staring to become interesting - not yet sure of I like it.






The Camponotus got something special today, a flower chafer beetle larva. It seems to be very popular - in fact it's the first time I've ever seen a major carving up food.
Oh, and I had to refill their feeder. It had actually been empty for about a day so I refilled it yesterday and it took them a SINGLE NIGHT to suck it dry. I think I need bigger feeders.

Edited by Serafine, March 13 2018 - 9:40 PM.

[drtrmiller]

I just received a horizontal and vertical nest from SimAnts.de last week. They are well made with tight tolerances, and I especially appreciate how well they're documented. Highly recommended.

[T.C.]

I just received a horizontal and vertical nest from SimAnts.de last week. They are well made with tight tolerances, and I especially appreciate how well they're documented. Highly recommended.

How much was shipping?

[drtrmiller]

I just received a horizontal and vertical nest from SimAnts.de last week. They are well made with tight tolerances, and I especially appreciate how well they're documented. Highly recommended.

How much was shipping?

They do not export nests. You must use a freight forwarder to ship to a German address (I use BorderLinx), which then exports the goods to you. Costs are based on weight and volume. It's going to be too expensive for most people, especially with the weakening dollar.

[Serafine]

Well, it's been a while and I've been testing around with different foods, so today there's gonna be lots of pictures of ants eating stuff.

 

 

Let's start with a flower chafer larva. Those things aren't the cheapest feeder insects but they're pretty big and it takes the ants almost a day to tear it apart. When they got the first one it was immediately overcrowded by dozens of ants, even the majors helped with carving it up (something I've rarely seen before).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few days later they got a shromp - Lazy Tube, Empires of the Undergrowth Edition. It was gone in the morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes they're a bit on the slow side - most of the workers didn't get the memo that there's a full feeder just a few centimeters away directly next to the shrimp tubes.

 

The disadvantage of shrimps is that the ants make an enormous mess when chewing them to bits.

 

Three day later, the feeder is empty again.

 

 

This is cat food (meat and salmon) and it's reeeally hot stuff. They got it multiple times now and still cannot get enough of it. They even chew on it after it dried out.

 

 

 

Today they got live cricket(s). Took them around 20 minutes to hunt it down. Lessons learned: crickets are tough as nails and can survive even multiple attacks from majors before they finally succumb to their wounds and the formic acid. Look at the huge hole a major bit into it's back when it ran into the ant mob at the nest entrance. Even with that massive dent it was still capable of jumping away and survived for another five minutes before another mob of ants finally managed to pin it down. After a few hours of chewing the remnants are barely recognizable anymore.

Watching them hunting is quite interesting. There are a few very active workers that run around through the entire outworld until they flush out the cricket while the rest mostly hangs around and only gets aggitated when the cricket actually bumps into them. The active workers can even be attracted by carefully tipping against the glass with pincers.

 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, March 25 2018 - 3:29 PM.

[Serafine]

There's not that many ants in the nest now, a lot of them spend most of the time in the water tubes and the shrimp tubes of the primary outworld. During the day the outworld may seem empty but it's not - yesterday while cleaning the outworld (from all the mess they made with the shrimps) I accidentally bumbed into one of the shrimp tubes and within a few seconds hundreds of ants swarmed from the tubes and tried to attack my cleaning brush.

 

 

 

They started a another garbage pile in the new nest. Now they have two garbage chambers in each nest and I'm starting to think there's a pattern behind this.

 

The colony is starting to have a pretty insane amount of brood - just look at that chamber on the left. If they continue like that soon the whole bottom of the nest will covered in brood.

 

 

 

 

This clearly seems to be the queen's favorite spot. It's the exact same position where they started to dump brood when they first moved into the nest and while the queen does indeed walk around in the nest most of the time she can be found here.

Edited by Serafine, March 25 2018 - 3:33 PM.

[Bracchymyrmex]

Impressive!

[Serafine]

The outworld really really needed a cleaning. That's the amount of garbage they made in a bit over two weeks.

 

 

The sugar feeders are almost getting sieged now.

 

 

 

 

This is them leaving the outworld after I removed the towel (had to deal with about a dozen curious ants anyway but I'm getting used to work around them - they are pretty good at homing in on the brush if I stay at one spot for too long so I need to change places frequently, good thing there was more than enough to clean as they had scattered trash over pretty much the entire outworld).

 

 

 

Most of the colony and parts of the setup (the second outworld is missing, it just got a new water tube and there were barely any ants in it).

I also need to adjust their numbers estimate - they are definitely WAY beyond 1.5k now, probably more in the 2000-2500 workers range.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So much brood!

 

 

Two pictures taken on different days. Is it the same major?

 

 

 

Oh, and I found their toilet (one of them).

Edited by Serafine, April 4 2018 - 4:55 PM.

[Serafine]

Once again it took some time, but finally here's the new update

 

 

Just after the last updates they got more locusts and some crickets. They ate a dozen medium-sized crickets and 20 (!) medium locusts within 4 days. Fortunatelly they seemed to be fed up after that and their appetite went back down to more reasonable levels. The crickets and locusts were given prekilled (but not frozen) and they loved it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some close-ups of cute little ant babies in the nest's water tube.

 

 

[Serafine]

And on it goes...

 

I bought a box of roaches and one of them decided to shed it's own shell right wenn I wanted to feed the ants - easy food for Lazy Tube. Took them two days to carve it out until only the (still kinda soft) shell was left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spiders always get special treatment - they get dragged to the entrance imediately.

 

 

 

 

They clearly haven't understood the idea of ramps (but them chomped away the entire cat food in the feeding dish during a single night).

 

Edited by Serafine, April 29 2018 - 2:35 PM.

[Serafine]

And the nest pictures..

 

Outworld water tubes.

 

 

The shrimp apparentments.

 

 

The nest water tubes (with a huge egg/microlarva blob).

 

 

 

 

 

The main nest. New nest / old nest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another big egg blob.

 

[Serafine]

Had to change the setup a bit. The main issue was the connection between outworld 1 and 2 which had to be replaced completely as the tubing was too short to connect.
(the real PITA was the entrance area of outworld 2 - the tubing was pretty much stuck in place). The white clouds are private stuff, unfortunately the setup is now right in front of my pinboard.





The reason for the change were two new nests.

 

 

At first they were very shy (pics were recorded 3 days after the nests were attached)...

 

 

... now they are nicely spread across all four nests.
Interestingly the amount of ants in the outworld (in the shrimp tubes) has slightly decreased but the traffic between outworld 1 and 2 has increased significantly.
The majors seem to have some problems with the sloped tubing but they get to the top anyways (might have to put some cotton cord into that tube).

Edited by Serafine, May 18 2018 - 3:30 PM.

[Serafine]

A long time has passed since the last update but then there hasn't been anything spectacular to report.

 

The ants are doing great, they eat and eat and eat and grow (right now they seem to do more eating than growing), oh - and they produce quite impressive amounts of garbage.

They have peroidic episodes where they eat an insane amount of food (in german we have the nice term "Fressflash" for that) and then their appetite goes back down toa  more reasonable level.

 

Just after the last update they ate about 30 mid-sized and sub-aldult locusts and an even larger amount of crickets (all sizes) within around 5-6 days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After that locusts became pretty uninteresting and the few that were left were lying around pretty much unattended unti they spoiled.

 

Obviously processing this much food creates a good amoutn of garbage, so I cleaned it up.

 

 

Not sure what the ans were thinking but probably something around the lines "Did you see that all the garbage out there just dissappeared?" "Yes, let's quickly dump even more to that place!" when during the following night they excavated and entire garbage chamber and dumped it's contents into the outworld.

 

Great, more trash to clean up.

 

 

Oh, and you can't really let ANYTHING lie around in the open for longer than ten minutes right now without some stupid critter lying eggs on it. I noticed that when I found free ant food - IN MY FRIDGE (didn't expect those things could survive there, let alone grow). Well, the ants were happy about them.

 

 

 

 

They also got their monthly shrimp for salt supply.

 

 

This is "chicken soup" cat food (didn't know this was a thing until I saw it). The first approach was quite careful but then they seemed to get the taste. Once they were done with the drinking a part of the meat got taken into the nest, the rest was scattered around the outworld or dropped at the garbage dump.

 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, June 19 2018 - 12:56 AM.

[Serafine]

And here are the nest pics.

 

Interestingly there seem to be less ants in the nest than in the last post's picture but them most of the oder workers were out in the outworld drinking from the chicken soup.

Die larvae are growing pretty fast from small to big but then take ages until they start to pupate. Possibly the colony is keeping a lot of them in the last larval stage to use them as protein fabricators (they crush solid food and then give liquid protein drops to the adult workers which can't eat solid food) or they're just waiting for the current wave of pupae to eclose. There are a lot of brown pupae (just days or maybe a week away from eclosing) but almost no fresh white pupae which might hint to the later assumption.

 

Most of the pupae are stored in nest 4, with only a small pile in Nest 3 and 2 each. The queen is actually in Nest 3 which is kinda unusal (normally she's sitting in the middle of Nest 1, relatively close to the entrance), we'll have to see if this is a permanent change or just an exception (the queen can roam free in the nest and is more or less ignored by the workers, not like my Lasius queen that can barely be seen under the mass of ants constantly tending and grooming her).

 

 

 

 
 
There's also ants and brood in every nest water tube now. The two front ones will have to be exchanged probably in a few weeks (hopefully driving the ants out of them with daylight works, the workers in those tubes seem to be less sensitive to daylight than those in most other places).





 

 
 
And finally a few close-ups.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, June 20 2018 - 3:58 AM.

[CatsnAnts]

Wow, I just read through your whole journal and it took a whole day... this is SUPER inspiring and since I just got my first Camponotus queen ant, I will know a little of what to expect! One again, GREAT JOB on raising such a wonderful colony of ants!

[Serafine]

Thank you =)

 

Be aware though that not all Camponotus species grow that fast and that the growth of this colony seems to be exceptional even for their own species' standards. Of all the fragments I've found - there's barely any journals for this species at all (neither in english nor german) and the few that there are usually just end after about 1-3 years - the largest C. barbaricus colony in another journal was probably at around 1500-2000 ants after 5 years (the guy in the journal said 800 but they were clearly much more than a thousand - I've actually counted my ants several times before they broke three digits so I have a fairly good estimate on how a certain amount of these ants looks like and most of the times people tend to vastly underestimate their numbers). Other species grow even slower, C. lligniperda for example only lays two batches of brood, one in the spring and one during the summer - and only the spring batch will grow into workers during the same year.

The most important thing you need when raising Carpenter ants is patience. Most of them take a loooot of time to grow to a decent size and often during the first 2-3 years they are fairly unspectacular (and also have a tendency towards nocturnal activity), however once they made it to year 3-5 the amount of brood they can raise when fed well is pretty astounding and a large colony of those huge ants obviously just looks amazing =)

 

p.s. I've added some additional information to the last post.

Edited by Serafine, June 20 2018 - 3:55 AM.

[Serafine]

Long time no update, so here's one!

 

They're still eating and growing, there's a ton of new brood and during night a lot of ants come out to the outworld. They've even started putting brood into the primary outworld's test tubes, so they officially have true satellite nests now. As you can see the ants are currently avoiding the place near the heating cable, that's because it is really really warm here right now.

 

 

 

 

Setup index:

 

 

 

 

Nest pcitures:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nest close-ups:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nest water tubes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outworld water tubes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I finally found something they really enjoy (cat food soup with tuna and shrimps):

 

[DaveJay]

Sounds yummy!!!