383 replies to this topic

[sirjordanncurtis]

What are the dimensions of the nests?

[Serafine]

 

Dimensions: 180x180x67 mm

1 x Nest top (please select) - Dimensions: 180x180x32mm
1 x Nest bottom - Dimensions: 180x180x21mm
1 x Plexi disc scratch resistant 4mm

More info: https://www.simants..../SimAnts-Pro-M/

 

Update is under construction btw, today I chose 78(!) pictures for it - just need to sort and upload them now...

Edited by Serafine, June 11 2019 - 12:37 PM.

[Serafine]

Hi there, it's been a while!

To be fair though there hasn't really been that much going on until it got really warm around 3 weeks ago and my PC breaking down (repair took quite some time) didn't help either.

As a compensation though this update is going to have so many pictures it'll make Terry's computer go nuclear.

 

 

This is what the first outworld looks during the day now. When night falls there's even more ants.

They actually store brood in the outworld now, sometimes in the open but mostly hidden under or within the shrimp tubes.

The water tube satellite nests are full of brood as usual.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second otuworld is starting to look kinda crowded as well so I upgraded their shrimp tubes hotel.

 

 

 

 

 

I also checked some parts of the setup that are rarely portrayed because there's not really that much going. Looks like most of the ants from the plastic box resettled into the expanded shrimp hotel, those tubes used to be pretty full. Also the "end of the world" box (the milky plastic thing that doesn't look particularly nice has an ever-growing number of inhabitants (haven't opened that box in months).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I watered the corners of the outworld a bit as they ants where constantly trying to dig into the bottom - once the sand-clay substrate was nice and soft the workers started to do a ridiculous amount of digging. I'm not sure how much of the ground they axcavated but looking at the material they brought to the surface there are some really big chambers down there.

 

 

Edited by Serafine, June 13 2019 - 5:10 AM.

[Serafine]

 

 

 

They actually managed to carve a hole right through the substrate in a place I didn't even water. No idea where it leads to but I guess it's an exit from that artificial stone they've been using as a hideout for a few months now. It could also be connected to the large chambers on the left corner though, that is if they managed to carve through the ground all the way in between the bases of the artificial plants (which, considering the enormous amount of dirt they excavated, is actually possible).

In those shots you can also see the BIG byformica feeder (the 16ml version), it takes them around two weeks to completely empty it (that doesn't reflect their entire sugar consumption though as in the same time they also suck dry four 4ml feeders full of diluted maple syrup with added glocuse). For smaller colonies that feeder should last quite a while (I usually use Sunburst to fill it as that doesn't spoil, not sure if maple syrup would survive for 2 weeks given the current temperatures).

 

 

 

 

 

 

This picture is particularly cute. I like how most of the ants are perfectly aligned in the same direction.

 

 

 

The roach farm is slowly starting to show progess - there's first babies! Here's Daddy roach with one of his offspring (the tiny roach above the tail end of the big one).

 

 

This is after they molted for the first time.

 

 

The ants really love their raoches.

 

 

"How'd you like your roach, Ladies?"

"Vertically."

 

 

 

 

 

They really eat everything, this is what's left when they're done.

 

 

The leftovers of five days of feeding frenzy.

 

 

 

 

This cheap electric fly swatter was definitely one of the best antkeeping investments I ever made. During warm and sunny weather I can catch around 10-30 flies PER DAY by just leaving the window open and removing the anti-fly grid. The ants love them, particularly the really big ones.

 

 

 

[Serafine]

Since the colony is pretty big now they got some big food items. Well... they did eat most of them but it looks like do actually prefer the smaller locusts a lot. They also got soem wax worms (they still really love those).

 

 

 

 

 

I've also tried mealworms and to my great surprise they like those which is actually weird because they hated the Zophobas superworms (maybe it's because of their smaller size, like with the locusts).

In this pic one of the mealworms managed to crawl into that small hole and that major worker single-handedly pulled it back out.

 

 

5

 

 

A few days ago I noticed groups of workers sitting on the upper corners of the outworld apparently trying to push into the corners like they were attempting to prepare for a breakout.

Well, turned out they were just hungry and after they got a big bowl of cat food they were all back to the ground.

 

 

 

 

Here's some triple tropholaixs. Unfortunately I was too late with the camera, just a few seconds before it was actually four ants all with their heads up high doing quadruple tropholaxis musketeer-style.

 

 

 

Here's the new Simants which nests finally arrived after a ludicrous travel through half of the country because DHL actually sent them to the wrong distribution center (not angry though, I once worked in package sorting for a while and mistakes like those can happen). This time I decided to go with the type 4 chamber design to see if the ants have different preferences regarding the nest layout (they didn't care at all).

 

 

 

10

 

 

 

 

The new nests are attached. I had to move the entire table part of the setup 5cm to the right to make it fit.

 

 

 

They really love that tubing part above the nest heating cables, for some time they were even storing a big pile of pupae there.

 

 

 

Around a day later they started to bring first brood into the new nest (there's some pupae near the top of the nest, kinda hard to see though).

 

15

 

This is what it looked like after 2 days.

 

 

And at the three day mark. It was quite cold for a few days, so that may explain why they piled up all the brood near the left site where the heating cable runs (yes, the last nest has two heated sides).

 

 

 

And finally the entire series of nest pictures. These pictures were taken around a week after the nests got attached (around 4 days ago) and it was extremely hot during that time which is probably the reason why they removed most of the brood from nest 6 (the double heating cable setup makes the nest warmer than the others).

 

 

 

[Serafine]

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

A bit closer. There's lots of pupae now (finally!), looks like really needed the temperatures to be above 30°C for a while to get going.

No alates yet and I'm actually not sure if there will be any this year (Camponotus barbaricus usually flies in June so it would be a bit late for that) but we'll see.

 

 

 

 

 

10

 

 

 

Nest water tubes - the last one isn't a nest water tube but the nest entrance which is also used as a brood depot now as I had to invert the heating cable on the first four nests (there are actually two heating cables now, one for the first four nests which now runs down to the power supply on the left side and a second one heating the two other nests which runs down the right side). This change became necessary because the thicker tips of the cables got in each other's way (and believe me, dismounting all four heating modules and putting them back was quite a PITA that took over 20 minutes, surprisingly the ants didn't really care about the vibriations and stayed super calm).

 

 

 

 

15

 

 

 

 

Two close-ups, one of the queen and the other one of a nice batch of eggs.

 

 

 

 

And on a totally unrelated note - we made cookies!

(Getting the eyes to stick was quite annoying but in the end it all worked out fine)

 

[Serafine]

You know what time it is? Update time!

Yes, this took a while but at first there was no stuff happening and then there was a lot of stuff happening, so it was kinda problematic to throw out an update in time.

Also this time the pictures are mostly sorted by date and not by topic, so it may get a bit chaotic.


First, I found this beauty on the inside of my shutters a few weeks ago. It's likely a Lasius emerginatus queen and she has brood now, hopefully she's mated.







So here's the not-so lazy tube, storing brood in the outworld again. With all the places they're hiding brood it's really getting impossible to tell how many there is.





Had to clean their trash pile in the main outworld as they managed to make a huge mess, turned out the entire ground was wet. Removed all the sand and deposited new sand at other places so they'd ignore this place and it could maybe dry up a bit.



This far-way outworld towards the end of the setup now has a byformica feeder filled with water and interestingly they're actually using it when they ignored it before while it had sugars inside (there's another feeder in the next outworld across the tubing bridge, they get all their sugars from there).



I also replaced the cotton in the bird plastic water feeders with aquarium gravel as the workers always stuck substrate and shrimp sand onto the cotton, and while drinking from cotton works it seems like the ants don't really like to do it.



Here they are diassembling a locust.



Two weeks after the new nests were added.





Dinner time with cat food, wax worms and wet cat food.



They love those wild flies.





Three weeks in the new nests, now they're really occupying them.



 

Edited by Serafine, August 15 2019 - 1:27 AM.

[Serafine]

Life in the shrimp hotel, the new tubes are now full of ants just like the old ones.





This was a bit odd - usually males are rather "meh" and only eaten when everything else is gone but for some reason they really swarmed this ones despite being fed with smaller roaches as well.



The big feeder (16ml version) is becoming really useful and yes, they ate a lot of roaches.



The pupating wave begins.



So one morning I woke up to this.



Remember earlier when I said I replaced the cotton in those water feeders with aquarium gravel? Well, the feeders ran dry and in their search for water the ants removed most of the gravel and dumped it all over the outworld (the feeder is refilled in the picture but you can still see the pile of excavated pebbles).



More tasty roaches!



Finally, they're getting lots and lots of pupae!







Electric fly swatter ftw! This is just one of many, they got over 40 wild flies that day and were quick to secure the loot.







Two evening outworld pics.





Okay, so the next pictures require some explanation...

One night (local time, not sure what time it was in the US) we had a voice chat discussion on the Discord about a study on endosymbiotic Blochmannia bacteria in Camponotus ants. Those bacteria have the ability to turn urea into useful proteins and vitamins although it's not known if it only recylces the ant's waste products or processes urea that got actually consumed by the ant. At some point Armando half-joking (?) suggested that maybe we should all pee in our byformica feeders and find out if the ants will drink it.

Yeah... so... there's pee in those feeders... well, it's for science I guess...

At the start it didn't look promissing, the ants were attacking the feeder andthen proceeded to ignore it.



After maybe half an hour the first workers found out that there is actually fluid inside the feeder.





Minutes later the feeder was almost empty with several ants sucking it dry...



... so I replaced it with a 4ml version which got immediatly swarmed and was empty not even an hour later. They consumed 15ml over the evening and completely ignored their sugar feeders, during the next day they drank 8ml per day and after day 4 went down to a stable 2ml per day. More on that later.





The water feeder in the main outworld was also heavily frequented for a short time.



Lots of ants on the shrimp tubes, they're really covered with ants during the night.



Now the new nests are completely filled with brood (no idea why they keep all those pupae in the bottom right corner).


 

[Serafine]

Eggs!



There's also a few eggs in there.



They make trash so quickly.



Here's a bit of a traffic jam.



Omnomnom, roaches and crickets.



Full House, they were REALLY hungry for sugars. Good thing that 16ml feeder lasts longer than a day.



So 4-5 days after they first got pee and drank around 40ml combined this happened. That's not all of them, there were more around the nest (and in the outworld water tubes).

More recently they also started to show significantly less interest in all feeder insects (with the exception of those green flies) but upped their sugar consumption by around 50-60%, which would align perfectly with the assumption that the endosymbionts can turn urea into protein (and need sugars as fuel to do so).

There's only a single study from 1983 mentioning ants going for animal urine but some people have said that if you pee into a forest during night Camponotus pennsylvanicus workers will swarm all over it, also every single Camponotus species seems to have bird or lizard poop as part of their diet.

A few other antkeepers have reported increased egglaying and decreased insects in feeder insects after giving them pee, too, but for now this is just a plausbibility test with anecdotial evidence (even though it's pretty strong in some cases). If more people test this and and report back with positive results it may lead to an actual study.












Nest 6, note the growing dumps of cocoon hulls on the left corners.



The live pupae were on the right side.



Another funny pic of ants aligning themselves in astonishing order.



Yes, that's outworld #10. Yes, they carried brood all the way around 8 meters from the main nest into this tube. Why? I don't know.



There's also some brood in the feeding outworld's test tube (#2) but it's not that much.



For some reasons they suddenly really love this sugar jelly and have been working it down for almost a week now.



They also had some minced meat which took them around 4 days to process.


 

[Serafine]

Another random random outworld pic. All feeders just got refilled and they're working away on the meat and the banana jelly.



The following pics were taken two days ago when I got to bed reaaaally early, as a result woke up at 3am and couldn't sleep for a while - so I decided to take some pictures of the "night shift" and also poke into the nests.

The "end of the world" outworld #10. The brood carpet is a bit hard to see but it's actually quite a lot of young larvae.



Outworld #9 with the recently refilled water feeder. They empty it in around 4 days.



Outworld #8, there was quite a lot of traffic in there with ants walking around mostly between #10 and the sugar feeder in #7.



The forementioned sugar feeder in #7.



the "transition outworlds" #6 and #5.





The Antkit Size 8 Nest. I don't bother to water it anymore but even when I did they never stored brood in here, it's useful for the 180° turn though. The ants mostly use it as resting spot during the day so naturally there's not a lot of ants in there now.



Another "transition outworld", #4.



The only remaining plastic box in the setup aside from the "end of the world" box. One day it's getting replaced by something nicer. There once were a lot of ants in here and while it still has a decent population the majority seems to have moved to the "shrimp tube hotel" in #2 after it got it's extension.



The primary feeding outworld #2 with the shrimp tube hotel. On pictures it always looks a lot less populated than it actually is, probably due to the lack of movement.





The primary otuworld next to the nests. During the night this one is just FULL of ants.













This picture gives a decent impression of how it actually looks in reality.



Lots of tiny brood in the tubes!


 

[Serafine]

With the first load of eggs turning into tiny larvae there's more eggs.







Nest pics.























Nightly traffic.



Ever seen a Lion ant? This girl grabbed a fly by the throat and she didn't let it go while it was flailing around like crazy for four minutes.



Another warm day with tons of flies.



They made a trash pile in the main outworld, like a real small hill. Good thing it was surpisingly easy to clean up with a tea spoon.





So for a few days I was heating only the two most leftsided nests and the ants brought most of their pupae into them, piling them up all the way to the ceiling.

Let's see how they develop over the next month or two and if there's more eggs to come.


 

[rbarreto]

That was a great read thanks for the update. As for the pee.... Goodluck with that haha.

[Serafine]

Addendum: Eggs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, August 15 2019 - 2:05 PM.

[Acutus]

WOW!! when you do an update you do an update!! What an awesome setup! I love it!      As for the pee well I'll keep an eye on your research and see how it goes! LOL I do however  keep birds of prey so I'm thinking of maybe introducing some bird droppings.

[Serafine]

Update time!

 

 

Things go along as usual in the outworlds. Note the huge trash pile (this is about what they produce weekly).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These pictures are from early September. They had quite a lot of eggs in the outworld tubes.

 

 

 

 

 

I placed another feeder in the corner of the feeding outworld. It quickly became one of the most popular ones.

 

 

 

 

Some pictures of the shrimp hotel. There's really a lot of ants in there.

 

 

 

 

There wass some brood in the feeding outworld tubes but not a lot. I do however expect them to have large piles of brood underground in the substrate where they dug some extensive chambers - but I can't look there as this would require lifting the entire glass container.

 

 

It's a bit hard to see but there's still some brood in the "end of the world box" tube as well.

 

 

 

They had a LOT of eggs in the nest water tubes.

 

 

 

 

 

[Serafine]

 

Nest pictures from early-mid September. Quite a lot of brood although not as much as in the months before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lots of eggs in the nest water tubes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Serafine]

 

 

The queen with lots of tiny brood around her.

 

 

 

Thes are consuming a pretty large amount of sugary sweets and this time they completely obliterated the banana jelly for what ever reason. It was just one huge mess.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here they got some roaches on mid September. It was pretty much the last time they ate properly in September. For the rest of the month they still drank lots of sugars but mostly kept ignoring any other food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here they are trying some sparkling lemonade. At first the carbondioxide caused a massive defense reaction but after most of it had dispersed they just licked it up like normal sugar water.

 

 

 

 

This was about a week ago and the first time they took a proper meal in around 6 weeks (it's bee brood and wet cat food).

 

 

 

So as a follow-up they got a few roaches and went absolutely ballistic on them. I have rarely seem them this aggressive towards food but then the colony seems to be a bit more on the aggressive side in general, more on that later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Serafine]

 

 

These nest pictures are from around a week ago. There's not a lot of pupae left and generally the amount of larvae has gone down quite visibly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They have lots of small larvae in the nest water tubes though and a huge carpet of them in the primary outworld water tubes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some close-up nest pictures, including the queen.

 

 

 

 

 

As mentioned earlier the colony is quite a bit more aggressive than it used to be. Partially responsible for that are some huge majors (and I mean really huge, like almost 2cm) that appeared in the feeding outworld over the last weeks and are visibly standing guard at certain areas like the artifical plant shrub. The medium-sized workers seem to be inspired by their presence and act even more bold (and reckless) than before, sometimes they even attack the feeders after I refilled those.

 

 

 

 

 

So one day I was just watching the ants doing there thing when I saw something big moving in the shades.

 

 

 

Here you can see about half of just ext to that big leaf on the right side. I made like dozen shots but never really got a remotely decent picture.

 

 

 

Only when she felt annoyed (probably because of all the nearby workers going crazy over the fresh roaches) and moved out of the shrub I got the chance to take a semi-decent picture.

 

 

 

Yes, that's a worker queen, a queen that broke off her wings to act as a worker and it's the first reproductive caste ant I've ever seen in this colony (other than their founder queen) - which is kinda odd considering that there are zero signs of drones (usually colonies produce those first because they are cheaper) and I haven't seen any other alate or dealate so far.

 

 

[Serafine]

She basically made one full walk through the outworld before she hid under paper sheet covering the water tubes.

 

 

 

 

 

And now for something very different.

 

 

 

So this is a Myrmica queen I've found during early August when she was bashing her head against my lamp.

The following pictures show the development over the last 2.5 months. I was actually surprised how easy it is to care for a semi-claustral ant - it's basically just dropping some fruit flies into the box every few days until she gets first workers. And wow do they develop quickly, especially the pupa stage takes barely a week for this species.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is their future food supply.

Apple vinegar, lots of sugar, baking soda and some cotton - the stuff is pretty much foolproof, it doesn't mold, rarely develops mites and the fruit flies love it.

 

 

 

 

[Serafine]

Hey! This time it's only going to be a relatively small update.


Lots of ants in the primary outworld. This is the night shift, taken picture of at around 4am.










The secondary large outwrold doesn't look that crowded at first glance...



... but they're all just hiding during the day (gonna take a picture of them at night at some point).




They still like their tasty roaches but not much else. They're quite picky lately.








This is a perfect example of the colony growing without obviously visible effects. They've taken over the entire hollow root.










A few days ago I didn't properly close one of the small outworlds after feeding a fly to the ants. There was a gap large enough for workers to squeeze through and it took around 6 hours before I realized when refilling a water feeder.
Two ants escaped, one of them actually made her way through the entire room to a small table lamp. After I put her back in she got a serious cleaning and was licked from head to butt for around an hour.
Some of the workers even attacked her, grabbed her by the foot and dragged her around. If I had put her into one of large outworlds closer to the nest I'm fairly sure she would have been killed (this has happened before and is why when I put back espacees I drop them to the place furthest away from the main nest, they seem to be way more accepting there).










Some nest pictures. The number of brood in the nests is down a bit but surprisingly there's still quite a lot of pupae and as you'll see next also a to of tiny larvae.