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The breeding seasons has began again with this nice clump of eggs, although there are some larger larvae in the nest i think they must have been left over from last year before hibernation. Looks like they are content with the new nest.
I have just hatched a batch of blue bottle casters so all my ants are feeding on flies.
http://www.hawgs.co.uk/files1/ants/messor/2012eggs.jpg
Where did you get the bluebottles!! And nice egg shot!!!
Hello Andie , great stuff mate , looking like they are doing great :D
Adam
Good luck for the new holding year, what temperatures do you have?
My breeding construction needs to be finished, 14°C are a little bit low for laying eggs (only three pleometrosis-queens have layed some eggs...).
Well may your queen lay eggs as if there is no tomorrow! :grin:
@ Antman
I used to use bottle flies for feeding preying mantis as they are an extremely cheap and nourishing food. For about £2.50 i can buy a pint of maggots from our fishing tackle shops, which equates into a few thousand flies. I own a preying mantis forum in the UK and i seem to remember that one of our Canadian members mentioned that your fishing shops don't stock maggots. I can't be sure of that though.
The maggots are already full grown and will pupate in 2 - 3 days and hatch in approx 14 days for blue bottles and 10 days for green bottles, at room temps. If you hatch them all at once your going to have a few thousand flies but fortunately you can put the maggots, casters and flies into the fridge which will slow them down. The maggots will pupate and hatch after a few weeks in the fridge and the flies will become dormant. The flies when warmed up can be fed on honey/sugar water or fruits, so when you them feed them to your ants, they are also getting all the stuff we already feed plus proteins :) and also the risk of introducing mites are virtually eliminated.
Latest batch of blue bottles being gut loaded
http://www.hawgs.co.uk/files1/ants/flies.gif
@ Markus
The nest is being heated from underneath by a small 6 watt heatmat the queen has positioned herself about a third of the way up from the bottom and the temp there is 21.8 c
Awesome!!!! Yes you are correct, fish and tackle shops here don't sell maggots. It really does suck! I will PM you, thanks for the info!!
Is this tank ok for my Messor barb a rus ill get on tuesday its a bit empty at the sec lol :?
Yea looks good :) They will probably end up nesting in all that substrate so perhaps you might want to take that out, unless thats your plan. Are you getting the ants tuesday or the tank ?
yeah i got the queen today and my plan was to let them dig is that ok or do I need anything else :?and that is my tank.
Today i was happy to see that there are already pupae inside the nest, all goes well so far this year for the harvesters. I still have plenty of dandelion seeds left over from last summer and they are always eager to choose these over millets, another month and i will be able to collect more of these seeds. I still want to get some niger seeds to see how they compare.
http://hawgs.co.uk/antblog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/22.jpg