Let me clarify for you guys.
We caught our B. depilis queen during late October of last year. She is very healthy and very little. We took her out of hibernation about three weeks to a month ago, and she has a sizable brood; we're expecting workers within a week or two. Right now we have her in a standard 16x150mm test tube setup. We understand we could probably keep an entire colony in the tube for the duration of her life, but we're very interested in what it would be like to design and create our own formicarium.
I want to move her out as soon as possible, so she has more time to get comfortable with her new formicarium (or I guess it'd be a founding chamber, at this point). We've both watched Crystals' grout-formicarium videos, and checked out multiple threads. We want to make her new nest something like the Tarheel Ants Inception Chamber, it seems practical, neat, and easy to maintain. We've been messing around with making sanded grout molds using petri dishes and molding clay. I'll share some of the results.
We have 1.5", 2" and 4" petri dishes we can use as molds; I personally think the 2" dish would be optimal. This is one of the issues we're having, we don't know what size would be the best option. The 1.5" would be great for an initial claustral chamber, but we can always sculpt the chambers to be a little smaller in the 2" if we need to.
We also have questions about hydration. We only have sanded grout at the moment, nothing special. I'll show you some of the ideas I had about hydration, I drilled holes in the sides and top of the formicarium. I just don't know how we can guarantee the grout will dampen to the point where it'd be properly hydrated. We could always section off one of the chambers with cotton and fill it with water, to simulate the kind of hydration the queen was used to in the test tube.
I've made two holes in the grout mold. Theoretically, the mold would lay on the floor of an ideally sand outworld, so the entrance(s) of the formicarium would be level, if not underneath the sand. This way, the ants could bring sand in or out fairly easily and customize their nest to however they might like it.
Here's what we've been up to:
The red spots could be potential water towers, or pockets, or whatever you'd call them. The green highlights the chamber, of course and the yellow clouds highlight the entrances to the outworld (the larger being the entrance that the transportation tube would attach to during the move). The blue is the only current wanter tower I've drilled out.
Edited by VoidElecent, March 14 2017 - 11:59 AM.
