Greetings from the middle of the Netherlands! I've been interested in ants since I was 11 years old, but at that time nobody I knew had even heard of the internet, forcing me to pretty much figure out everything about ant-keeping on my own, assisted by this ancient little book. Nests back then had to be made with glass plates, petri dishes, (glass!) tubes and gypsum poured into cigar boxes. This was something that I just couldn't get right and thus my hobby slowly but certainly grinded to a halt.
Queue twenty years later, my girlfriend comes home with this 'huge ant' so I explain to her this is a Lasius niger queen. I take a D&D dicebox, place an upturned little tube in the middle, fill the remaining space with a centimeter of sand and poke a little starter hole. Now we can observe the queen founding her new colony! But my curious girlfriend wants an even better view so we look online for a decent formicarium. Quickly I realize that the art of keeping ants has definitely not stood still over the last two decades.
I've gotten quite excited about now being able to take up ant-keeping again as a hobby, together with my girlfriend, in ways I couldn't even have dreamed of as a little kid flipping over rocks in his parent's rock garden. Right now we have 8 Lasius niger queens, among which the original, named 'Ameising Grace'. The rest have been placed in glass tubes, previously containing spice mixes (thus they have all been named after spices).
We're probably going to give several of them away in gypsum nests I'm working on (cheap polypropyline jars are an amazing invention). To be eventually replaced by a few other ant species, some of which I never got to see with my own eyes before! On our list (for now) are Messor barbarus, Camponotus ligniperda, Lasius flavus, Formica fusca, Myrmica rubra and Temnothorax nylanderi.
We'll also be blogging our ant-ventures with updates about our ant families, tips and tricks about the various aspects of ant-keeping, and funny or curious facts and stories about ants in general for those interested.
Edited by Stroomschok, August 20 2017 - 11:57 AM.
