Blog

7/16/2024:

I witnessed brood stealing in my Tetramorium colony. One of them managed to burrow past the cotton and into its neighboring nest and steal brood. One of the colonies is now very strong and the other weak and depleted.

6/4/2024:

Ant season is in full swing, I am at full capacity for test tubes, and will need to order more. I have 2 Lasius neoniger queens, one Camponotus pennsylvanicus queen, two Camponotus herculeanus queens, and one Formica queen. They are all doing well and are full of brood. They are looking quite healthy and I am keeping a close eye on their development. I also am investigating keeping other hymenopterans. The orange species was actually a thief ant , Solenopsis molesta, Which explains the stinger they posses.

6/2/2024:

Went to a pool party, who knew the hosts house was filled with a myriad of wasps! Luckily I came prepared with a test tube. Mud dauber's were spotted on a staircase, as well as a nest in the air vents. The biggest find however, was a young paper wasp nest, I snatched the whole thing and later, separated and preserved the larvae and eggs in alcohol, as well as pinning the queen.

11/30/2023:

The ants in the fridge are still alive. They will most likely survive the winter, assuming no complications arise. I still have not been able to ID the Monomorium sp

11/6/2023:

I have placed all colonies in the fridge for diapause. The ants will not freeze due to glycerol being present in the ants body. Glycerol forms strong hydrogen bonds with water molecules competing with water to water hydrogen bonds. To form ice water needs hydrogen bonds to form its crystal lattice shape, glycerol disrupts these bonds allowing supercooling. Also I observed a nuptial flight of a small orange ant species(Monomorium???). I hope to ID this ant.

10/13/2023:

To begin the process of diapause, I have moved them from the incubator into room temperature, when snow falls I will place them into the fridge. All colonies are doing well, however the C. pennsylvanicus colony is low on water, and would not move to another test tube. C. pennsylvanicus does prefer dry conditions, but still need moisture to survive diapause in the winter.

9/17/2023:

A huge nuptial flight day today. Many queen ants are flying. I hope to catch one. The speicies seem to be a small Lasius speicies they are usually the last observed to fly in my area.

9/5/2023:

The eggs of the Formica fusca queen have died. I have no idea why. The queen seemed to be trapped in the cotton of her test tube. This is very dissapointing.

8/18/2023:

I caught a Formica fusca queen , she has laid 4 eggs. The other ant colonies are doing very well. The Lasius queen has a lot of brood and I am expecting nanitics in the next week or two. I fed the Carpenter ants a white-eyed bee larvae to boost egg production.

7/25/2023:

After a long vaction in Vietnam, I caught another queen ant. I think it is of the species lasius alienus. SHe has laid many eggs and I think her colony is will be very fit to survive the winter. The carpenter ants( Camponotus pennsylvanicus are also doing well with plenty of brood. I have expanded the test tube a bit to allow for drier conditions which they seem to enjoy very much. I hope to catch Camponotus discolor as I have seen many virgin alates, but can't seem to come across a mated one.

5/29/2023:

I have acquired a Camponotus novaeboracensis queen, which is a speicies that closely resembles its black counterpart Camponotus pennsylvanicus, but instead has a brilliant dark shade of red for an abdomen. She has laid 2 eggs. My other colonies are doing well.

5/11/2023:

I fed my ants their first protein source which was a June beetle. I hope to ramp up egg production. The Carpenter ant colony is growing fast, with brood and workers growing everyday.

4/24/2023:

The Lasius americanus queen I caught has now laid eggs. Some of the eggs will become workers, the other ones are for her consumption(they are unfertilized). It took a few days for her to begin the process of laying eggs. My other ants colonies are doing well, with the Camponotus and Formica queen ramping up egg production.

3/9/2023:

The carpenter ant queen has started laying eggs(3). The larvae are all healthy. I think there will be a major soon. All and colonies look healthy

2/22/2023:

The carpenter ant colony has emerged from hibernation. The workers quickly emerged from their frozen position, but the queen took one day to wake up(after all carpenter ants are the largest ants in north America). The queen and the brood nearly drowned, as water was seeping in from the cotton, due to the cold temperatures. This is very common among ants that are hibernated under artificial conditions.

My Superworms have begun metamorphosis, and have turned into pupa. The pupa kind of resemble the chest-burster from the movie"Alien".

10/23/2022:

All of my ants have started to answer hibernation, to improve their glycerol(anti-freeze) levels I have fed them more sugar which contains all the components to make glycerol. The Queen is motionless because her metabolism has shut off. She is so large that at temperatures of 50 degrees, she starts hibernation.

8/14/2022:

I noticed that when the bee larvae are exposed to light, they start to metamorphize, regardless of their size.

Whenever I removed the bees from their leaf cocoons they started to spin thread, regardless of size.

8/6/2022:

Today I removed the cocoons of the leafcutter bees, I placed them into cells for observation. some of the larvae are spinnning cocoons

8/3/2022:

My fish have ick(which is a parasitic protozoan) it is round with a horse shoe-shaped nucleus.

7/30/2022:

Unexpectedly the queen wasp died, but her brood survived. I have been hand- feeding her brood.

The wild ant colony has been growing well into the thousands.

The ant colony has been well fed, and some workers nearly resemble repletes.

the leafcutter bees I keep, have nearly capped all of their nests

One of my fish died, and I used my superworms to clean the meat off the skeleton. after only a few minutes the fish was nothing but a pile of bones.

7/6/2022:

Today I caught a paper wasp queen along with her nest. She has eggs in each singular cell.

The queen is from the genus Polistes. She chews paper sources into a pulp to make hexagonal cells for brood.

I made a grasshopper enclosure for ant feed.

6/18/2022:

I have caught 3 Camponotus pennsylvanicus queens

And i have captured a wild ant colony along with the queen, they have numbers into the hundreds or thousands.

The lasius americanus queen has 3 workers.

The formica fusca colony still has 0 which is odd.

4/26/2022:

Both ants have eggs

For formica fusca: 2 pupae 1 larvae

For lasius americanus: 7 larvae 2 eggs

9/6/2021:

Today I have started my campaign to get the queen back to her original weight. I have fed all the workers honey. I noticed them pulling on the cotton and I decided to move them into the AC test tube setup. The test tube set up is a box with 4 ports .I connected the nest tube to the AC test tube portal. And fed them a cricket leg and they immediately sliced and diced it into edible pieces. The queen ant is already fattening up. I don’t think she will lay any more eggs because she has a long winter ahead of her. The nanitics are busy grooming and feeding the queen. I was very lucky and was able to film mouth to mouth feeding (trophallaxis)

9/8/2021:

THe queen ant is fatter and is much more healthy i will feed her periodically to

10/10:

Development has stopped prepare for winter brumation keep her safe not too cold but not too warm at least larger than 32 f

In spring record eggs laid per day and temperature to find eggs per day to temp ratio graph

8/31/2021:

Still waiting on the 4th nanitic.

She has hatched.

8/30/2021:

The second and 3rd nanitic have hatched there are two more left to go. The queen and nanitics are very active.

8/29/2021:

I got a new mealworm farm with a starting population of 60. They will feed the ants in the near winter. And later in the future.I put the mealworms in a plastic hefty box and filled the bottom with their food of oatmeal and for moisture and water source carrots.

8/28/2021:

The worker ant has darkened and has turned into a functioning worker.

I have since observed her cleaning and getting meals from the queen. There are 4 more puppies left. The worker ant still can not eat foods besides the ones the queen feeds it.

8/26/2021:

The silk cocoon finally hatched giving me the first nanitic of the colony as expected she was white but will darken over time. This nanitic took exactly two weeks to hatch and will be the benchmark for other ants. The nanitic was small which was also expected because they were the first generation . The ant will have to darken before I feed it, and the others will hatch within the next 2 or three days.

8/23/2021:

All the ant pupaes are darkening

8/20/2021:

Today I could see the eyes developing. I can also see the eyes behind the cocoon of the larvae. The eyes of the other ant pupae are developing too, turning a faint brown. I hope to catch the nanitics hatching out of the cocoon.

8/19/2021:

I noticed the eyes are developing in the pupae . When the eyes are fully darkened they are about to hatch. I also noticed that one of the larvae still had not fully metamorphosed and was still moving. I will try to find the physical differences between the ones in the cocoon and the ones that just went under their own skin. I believe this would change the physicality of these ants. And I will find the ratio between pupaes and cocoons right now with a small sample size. It is ¼ one cocoon and 4 pupaes.

8/18/2021

Today I counted the number of broods to be 5 ,but you may be asking, weren't there nine eggs?

Queen Ants lay 2 batches of eggs one half fertilized and one half unfertilized obviously she would eat the unfertilized eggs for food because sperm is ever so precious. THe queen does need food and buy laying eggs she can store the food somewhere to keep her body from straight up using the energy.Unfertilized eggs hatch into drones which are practically useless for a colony because they mate with other virgin queens .If you look at some other ant colonies on youtube you may notice that some have drones because the quen didn’t need to eat all of the unfertilized eggs and still could raise a colony. This typically does not happen in the wild because the ants would calculate their resources to the natural environment that they would nest in. I keep my ants outside to mimic this with the garden pot to mimic the underground and have darkness the pot also almosts mimics the temperature in the soil but stays a little above not to make a big difference. The reason drones show up in artificial environments is because antkeepers want to speed up the process and keep ants at higher temperatures than usual this means that the ants will develop much faster and the queen does not need to eat all of her unfertilized eggs. This is why there are anomalies like this.

The ratio of fertilized to unfertilized is almost half and half if the number of eggs is odd usually there will be one less unfertilie egg.

I also noticed that while one of the pupae is a cocoon another one is arught under the skin this is very interesting because the majority of ants only metamorphosize one way or the other. I hope to have more detailed time lapse footage of this.

8/13/2021:

Today I was filming one of the larvae spinning a cocoon . It will be done maybe by tomorrow. If you look very carefully at the top of the cocoon you will see a dark spot, that is the fecal pellet the larvae expelled. This is all the waste that the larvae will expel to keep for maximum cleanliness. I will keep filming throughout the night.

8/13/2021:

8/12/2021:

Today one of the larvae have pupated into a cocoon it will hatch within the next week. Ants typically go through metamorphosis in 2 ways: one way is spinning a cocoon and second it under their layer of skin. An ant cocoon is like a typical moth cocoon with a tannish color and typical pill shape. An ant metamorphosing under its skin looks like a larva at first but you can see it develop overtime.

The ant workers will hatch and will be white when they come out of the cocoon and need to harden and turn black.

Diet: i think for their first meal i will feed them a drop of honey for these ants tend to have a sweet tooth. And as a fifth meal I will feed them protein such as a piece of mealworm or cricket leg. By the winter I think the queen will have 9 workers and they will survive throughout the winter with her.

After the workers hatch the colony will grow at a much faster rate because their is much more food and more helping hands. The first generation of workers are scared and jittery because they know that if they die it will be a huge hit on the colony.

8/11/2021:

Today I noticed the queen works more and more everyday with the same energy. I also noticed signs of her getting thinner which is expected. Her abdomen is considerably smaller but she still remains at the same level of activeness. She will get thinner and will ultimately survive and will be at her weakest when the first workers hatch. But even when the workers hatch they will have a white color and then they will slowly darken. They will be ready when I notice them pulling on the cotton blocking the test tube. I will then release them into the AC ant test tube portal.

I am planning on raising mealworms. I have the enclosure set up i just need the worms and the oatmeal. It is 22 dollars for 1000 mealworms so they are very very cheap. I definitely can afford them with my own money.

After the first ants emerge the queen will need a boost of protein.

8/10/2021

Today I was able to film the ant larvae moving. The ant larvae are getting fatter everyday. They are well fed.

Date:8/9/2021

Today I observed the ant larvae moving after I took the clay pot out. The larvae are huge and are becoming more fit within the past few days. Ants undergo complete metamorphosis like butterflies, moths and beetles. The queen Has laid 2 more eggs in the mix of brood. She is very busy and still very active and strong. She licks the larvae every few minutes and has clearly been feeding them very well. She has them clumped into a pile(s) .

The gray spot on the cotton is unfortunately moldy. But i can always swap the ants into a new test tube.

Date:8/8/2021

Today the ant larvae where huge and all eggs have hatched they seem to be developing fast. The queen ant is as busy as ever tending to each and every larvae’s needs. Each larvae is filled with the protein soup.

Date:8/6/2021

All eggs have hatched and turned into larvae. Looking through the translucent bodies of the larvae I can see the protein soup that they have been fed. You can see some ant larvae are bigger than others. This is a certain form of polymorphism where some workers are scaled up versions of the other ones. All ant workers are sterile females; each worker lives for about a month after metamorphosis. The lifespan of one worker is about 3 months in total.

Today I was able to film the ants licking the brood and using my digital microscope to film the tongue up close. The queen ant licked and cleans the larvae meticulously as they are more vulnerable to mold and disease. According to my observations, she moves them ever more meticulous according to their moisture needs.

I noticed a little bit of greying in the small area of the water portion of the test tube. This shouldn’t be a worry since if it is mold it is not that serious and poses no risk to the ants. Ants are adapted to live with a certain level of mold since their nests are underground.

The health of the queen seems to be very good. She is still in shape showing no signs of significant weight loss or weakness.

Note:watch the rate of development for larvae.

Date:8/5/2021

The eggs have finally hatched! The larvae are motionless as ant larvae are. But with closer inspection you can see the food the larvae has been fed by the queen.The food is a protein rich soup made from the wing muscles of the queen. Ant larvae are clear and see through and the larvae like the eggs are sticky and are easily clumped together . They are also covered in tiny hairs. To sense and and also firmly stick to each other. You see this in my footage when the queen pics up all of the eggs at once. Ant larvae can eat solid and liquid foods unlike workers who can only drink solid foods. The other eggs seem to also be on the verge of hatching and should be due to hatch in the nest 1 to 2 days. The ant larvae are very fat and healthy and show no signs of harm.

The queen seems very strong but raising the larvae will take a toll on the health of the queen which is why it is crucially important that the larvae survive to become workers.if i see the queen is too weak which is very rare because the queen ants have a very good sense of body budget and know just how much to feed the larvae to sustain th

e colony without starving.

These formica ants are adapted to take in sweets. Their mandibles are shaped for drinking honey and honeydew secreted by scale insects. Ants need three things sugar, Protein and, Water

Sugar for energy protein for growing and laying eggs. Boosting the ants' food source especially protein will increase the the population in the colony substantially.

Larvae need a lot of protein to grow. They develop in about 2 weeks. Ant larvae are never neglected in the colony. Each one produces a pheromone to be fed and moved. Even with thousands or even millions of eggs, not one will starve.

Note: maybe 10 nanitics by the end of fall (nanitics are the first generation of ant workers.)

Date:8/4/2021

Today the queen was very active, even moving brood in my presence. I think that the brood are going to hatch within the next 5 days.the paper tube i put the test tube in to minimize scratches were crawling with springtails.they were probably attracted to the moisture and extra shade.

My cousin and I found a better surface .

Approximately 700 different species of springtails live in North America. Many different kinds can be found in a typical backyard. Springtails have scales that are usually creamy white or gray, but some species may appear yellow, orange, metallic green, lavender or red.The springtails that live under the pot are gray. I have seen them under the leaf mulch that has accumulated through the year.

The queen ant is very strong and shows no sign of disease. The test tube is still very sterile and shows no visible sign of mold. The eggs are well cared for and are clumped to gether in a neat pile.The colony will most likely reach 10 workers by the winter. But in the spring reach into the thousands.

Something to watch : a minor thing the cotton is a little gray probably from drinking.

Date 07/02/2021:

Today I observed the queen spending a lot of time licking herself to clean.

Ants do this to get rid of dirt and other particles on their skin and exoskeleton

Cleaning also gives the ants better smell as their antennae are refreshed. Ants have poor eyesight and rely mostly on smell to get around. Ant larvae and eggs produce scents that signal their health. Which is how a queen can sort them and care for them.in an ant nest with thousands of eggs no egg is neglected because they all can communicate. The queen seems to be doing fine. But over time she will get weaker. By then,her first age of workers can go out too find food. The workers will bring back food and the queen can lay more eggs. The colony will be workers strong.

Looking at the wet cotton ball I see there are many depressions on the surface of the cotton.This means that the queen is actively drinking water.The eggs seem to be healthy with no algae or mold. The queen must thoroughly clean the eggs while I am not looking. Ants take short naps throughout the day lasting minutes so ants truly never sleep and are always at work.it seems ants are least active during the hottest hours of the day seeking cover in their nests.

Note: more and more collembola springtails are under the pot.

These are the grey springtails very common on the cement place in my backyard. They grow larger than the white one you would find in mulch. They are excellent decomposers and I would like to integrate them into the formicarium in the future. The springtails eat the ants waste and garbage so i won’t have to clean it up myself. Ants store all their waste in one spot like humans do. The queen ant stores all of her fecal pellets in one area of the test tube farthest away from the cotton and eggs to prevent mold. Ants are very clean to prevent mold in their nest. This is very important because it is a health hazard.

Inevitably this test tube will mold and I will need to get a new one for the queen. She will have to move her brood usually this happens later so i don’t need to worry about that yet.

Date 07/02/2021:

Goal: Film eggs close up with a microscope.

Success the eggs were not in detail asIi hoped because they were behind a piece of plastic. taking the eggs out could harm them and the queen. Ant eggs contain a high amount of protein this is why they are consumed in cultures around the world. Ant eggs have a slightly fishy and nutty taste. Ant eggs contain 10 percent pure protein the rest are fatty acids mineral .

Date:07/01/2021

I can see the eggs are darkening just a little which means the larvae are developing . Tis is expected because the eggs should hatch this week or next week. The larvae will be fed a protein soup made from the queen's obsolete wing muscles. The protein will give the larvae a boost in development. Ants larvae develop in up to 2 months.

Date:07/31/2021

Film the queen licking eggs and moving them.

It seems that the queen ants are very active throughout the day not as I expected

.When I check on my queen she is usually asleep or staying motionless. Probably because of the flash in light and the vibrations from opening the pot that I put her in. The queen freezes and smells the air with her antennae to assess danger.

Date:07/30/2021

The queen laid 2 more eggs in the morning and 2 at noon leaving the total number of eggs to be 10. Ant eggs take one to two weeks to hatch so I must be patient. The queen ant licks the eggs every day to prevent the eggs from bacteria, mold, and fungi. The ant spit is a natural antibacterial that helps protect the precious eggs. The queen also arranges the eggs from the heat and moisture gradients in the tube for the eggs to develop. Any eggs that need moisture. she moves them closer to wet cotton any eggs that are dry she moves them nearer to the nest entrance.

Date: 07/29/2021

The queen laid 2 more eggs leaving the total number of eggs to be 6. I started to notice the abundance of Collembola springtails under the pot where the test tube was. I am hoping that the Collembola springtails will be able to get into the test tube and breed adding a decomposer to the system.

Date: 07/28/2021

The night before a large thunderstorm occurred, this was the chance to see if my placement of the queen would work .NaturaIly, I was worried the queen would get swept away.But waking up and checking on her in the morning she was unfazed and unharmed in reverse the queen laid 4 eggs. Most queen ants like this one don’t need food in their colony founding stage due to the wing muscles they have in their thorax. The wing muscles are used to make the protein for eggs and later to feed the larvae.

Date:7/27/2021

I caught a Formica fusca queen at the island park pool

Formica fusca collect honeydew. Novgorodova (2015b) investigated ant-aphid interactions of a dozen honeydew collecting ant species in Western Siberia pine and aspen-birch-pine forests (54°7´N, 83°06´E, 200 m, Novosibirsk) and mixed-grass-cereal steppes with aspen-birch groves (53°44´N, 78°02´E, 110 m, near Karasuk) in the Novosibirsk Region and coniferous forests in the northeastern Altai (north end of Lake Teletskoe, 51°48´N, 87°17´E, 434 m). All of the ants studied had workers that showed high fidelity to attending particular aphid colonies, i.e, individual foragers that collect honeydew tend to return to the same location, and a group of aphids, every time they leave the nest. F. fusca showed no specialization beyond this foraging site fidelity. F. fusca tended Symydobius o blongus (Heyden), Chaitophorus populeti (Panzer), and Aphis craccivora Koch.