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The biggest colony have now several thousand workers and eat each day one large wax worms and about 4 or 5 medium wax worms (or Tenebrion pupae ), 8 sun fower seeds ,diluted honey and collect a large quatity of dandelion seeds .
The small colony have now about 400 workers I think but also very big piles of pupae so when they emerge the worker population will probably double. They eat only the equivalent of one tenebrion pupae every days ,one sun flower seed ,diluted honney and collect dandelion seeds most of it been pile up in a dry area just outside the nest so they eat about 10 times less than the larger colony .
I did read more carefully the list of lineages of T.sp.e .published by the Austrian team . There is only two samples from the US both belong to closely related lineages. One have been found also in Romania , the other have been found in Romania and other countries from Italy to Armenia. It will be premature to give any conclusion yet before we can read the results of more samples.
Update .
The small colony has easily doubled it's food intake as I expected .
Now they eat per day sun flower seeds ( 10 for the big colony , 2 for the small one) , diluted honey , a peace of defrost fish
and some wax-worms and/or Tenebrion pupae.
Update.
As for the biggest colony two months ago , the small colony become much more aggressive and dynamic when it attained around 800 workers . It now attack fast and massively when it discovered a wax worm , before (maybe 10 days ago) it did recruit only slowly and attacked with little agressivity when presented with living wax worms.
Update.
In the past I observed Tetramorium eating carrions of small birds , lizards or mice but 4 days ago I put a small dead bird
(who kill itself by hitting my living room window) one meter from a Tetramorium caespitum nest in my garden but the Tetramorium's did not show any interest and after sometime it was some Lasius niger who come to exploit it.
Now my small Tetramorium colony have grown so that they start to overgrow their nest . I add a small ant farm that I did buy many years ago but never used.
The biggest colony have now a constant activity and seems now to grow much more slowly.
Update.
For two or three days the big colony consume twelve decorticate sun flower seeds /day (+small apple piece , dead flies and wax worms). Yesterday they finish it early so today I give 15 and see if they finish it for tomorrow morning .
The small colony is now more than 1000 workers strong and have expand its nesting including larvae to the small ant farm .
Since yesterday the foraging activity of Tetramorium caespitum in my garden is much increasing and, as nights become warmer, I think it is time , in this area, to start to look for the first fertilized Tetramorium queens for those who want to start a new colony.
This morning I found the "ant table" and the ground around it full of hundreds of foragers from the big colony: They found a way out by bringing heart and trash on the oily anti-evasion on the cable of the warming stone. Good luck I have a mouth aspirator so in one hour and a half I captured most of the stray foragers after reapplying the anti evasion . If the scouts recruit so massively I suspect that I do not give enough food . This morning early all the 15 SF seeds were already gone so today I did give 20 seeds and 6 big and medium size wax worms.
I also discovered that at least big colony's can pierce the husk of sun flower seeds to feed on the inside but I thing it takes to much time to exploit the seed this way so it can be use only as a small supplement.
The big colony worker population must be about 10 000 now ,I think.
Update.
The large colony consume still 20 SF seeds a day but only two or three wax worms. This fluctuations are probably the result
of temperature fluctuations that accelerate or slow down the larval grow. But anyway they like much seeds and I am sure that
many wild colony's subsist almost entirely on small seeds.
Last December when I wanted to observed an active Tetramorium colony only lone queen was available but I found two small
colony coming from south Europe in an area where the map of cryptic species indicate the presence of Tetramorium sp E
and one or two other species . I am almost sure that the big colony belong to T. sp E because the bigger sise of at least half of
the workers and it's agressivity . The other colony belong visibly to an other specie with smaller workers ( I think Tetramorium caespitum or T. sp A)
The difference between the two Tetramorium colony's is obvious even when they had the same population (at different time).
The colony who is now the biggest one, probably Tetramorium sp.E have about half of it's workers bigger than the biggest
workers of the other colony . The presumably Tetramorium sp.E colony also harvest dandelion seeds and exploit sun flower seeds or peanuts very fast and actively even when the animal food is plentiful ,when to much food is given they loss interest
in the animal food but continue to harvest seeds at the same level. The other colony workers are smaller ,the same size as the Tetramorium caespitum that I can observe in Belgium and are much less interested in seeds : They harvest dandelion seeds slowly and when much animal food is given lost interest in sun flower seeds or peanuts.