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Hi Sianhilton ,
I just give the name of Tetramorium sp.A as an example but there are a number of species of Tetramorium in the world who have more than one queen per colony for example Tetramorium tsushimae.
Now fast growth of the colony at the beginning depend of good living conditions an plenty of the right food then it is limited by the number of workers working to feed and clean the brood so later with more workers more brood can be brow up to adult ants.
Later when the maximum egg production of the single queen attain adult stage the population grow more slowly and the colony produce more winged ants. Eventually the growth stopped and the energy of the colony is entirely use to produce winged ants.
In polygine colony the maximum growth rate of the colony can continue in theory for ever and the colony may have many nests .
Tetramorium caespitum and most other species of the Tetramorium caespitum group have a single queen but still they can rietch quickly a population of 10000 workers and the colony attain eventually 30000 workers.
Today scouts of the Tetramorium caespitum colony find a way out and when I realized it hundreds of ants were foraging on the table so it took about one hour to fix the problem and capture most of the stray ants: Nothing lost except time and few workers.
update,
The day before yesterday I did give a piece of mozzarella cheese to each of my colony's of Tetramorium sp.E ,T.sp. and the three colony's of Tetramorium caespitum living under the pavement around my house.They all love it and after a short time it was completely covered with ants cutting of small pieces.
The grow rate of my two Tetramorium colony's is increasing again so I am sure the nests will become soon overcrowded and it will become more and more difficult to prevent brake-outs so at least for next spring maybe still this season I must have new, bigger nests and "outside worlds".
Update,
Yesterday evening I came back home about 24 h absence and again an even more massive brake out of the Tetramorium sp. E . This time it is not without damages they invaded and destroy my two Solenopsis colony's :cry: , one had already 60 to 80 workers and had very well close nest with only one very small hole for the passage of the foragers but the Tetramorium were already in the test tube and no trace was left of the Solenopsis when I looked . I am still catching ants today and I estimate that at least 200 workers were loss .
So I must admit that the accommodations for such big Tetramorium colony have became totally inadequate .
Hi Amrik
Sorry to hear about your out break and subsequent loss of your S olenopsis colony. I am very familiar with outbreaks as my colony of Pheidologeton d iversus is now huge and every so often I am greeted my marching column of ants accross the floor. Solenopsis are normally good at defense and use gastor flagging to protect food / defend their nests. Which S olenopsis spec. do you have?
Hi
It was a colony of Solenopsis fugax ( Or S. monticola) who had enough workers and well enough enclose nest to defend itself so I never thought there was any danger and I did not think that the Tetramorium will pass the repulsive barrier keeping the Solenopsis inside. The other colony had just a few workers. So maybe the Solenopsis thief ants have to make some hard fighting to survive and plunder other ants nests , narrow gallery and poison aerosol seems not to be the absolute weapon we thing . I did want to observe predator /prey relations of these Solenopsis with Lasius niger and for this I developed three L.niger colony's from a single queen that I Keep somewhere else , now I can forget it . But I don't want to try again with Solenopsis thief ants: The workers are to small for me to observe ,I left that for younger people with a sharper short distance sight (the only ants smaller that I have seen are yellow Plagiolepis in India who are even less visible having a transparent gaster).
Tetramorium gr. caespitum (and other Tetramorium sp. that I observed in India) are generalist (mainly scavengers and seeds collectors) ,keep aphids on roots and hunt only small , very slow moving preys like worms and insect larvae. They recruit to hunt bigger slow moving preys only very near ( less than 7 cm) gallery or track entrances because they seems never to try to recruit for hunting a large prey more than a few centimeters from it. The fact that foraging gallery's radiate far from the nest and are pierced regularly by entrance holes make the collective hunting possible each time a very slow prey blunder near an entrance hole .They seems never to hunt any sort of mobile prey if not very small. When a forager find a food source it first ingest a bit of the food or carve a apart of it small enough that it can transport easily and then go to back to the entrance hole where it come from . If the food source is important the foragers can recruit back to the nest several meters away.
Hi,
To identify to witch cryptic specie belong a colony of the Tetramorium caespitum specie complex is sometime difficult but generally impossible to me. I supposed that my relatively large Tetramorium colony belong to T. sp.E but it can instead belong to T.moravicum (or maybe to T.forte at it's eastern limit ). All these three species are genetically close to T. impurum but live in area with warm summer temperatures.
Update,
For one week now I completely stop warming the two colony's but the room temperature is still between 22°c and 23.5°c .
I give every day insect larvae or killed insects or a piece of ham and sun flower seeds or peanut or a piece of nut ( they like much nuts) and diluted honey (as they can drink in no more than half an hour).
Contrary to many other ant keeper's observations my Tetramorium colonies nearly never cover their food with soil . I suspect that when they do so it is because the food start to putrefy or that the food is to much and wet or sticky.
Ants who do not constitute real reserve of seeds need a steady protein supply during the growing season to permit the development of a large brood.If the brood is small in quantity the sudden supply of much insect (or meat or fish) putrefy or mold and is covered with soil or trash.
One thing I observed in Teramorium gr. caespitum is that foragers like to hide in an insects carcass long time after no more food is left in it and use it as covered place from which they can be recruited to subdue a prey nearby . The "recruitment race" a few centimeters around a living prey does usually works only if it reach a foraging gallery or such group of foragers.
Ants drowning in diluted honey is a problem that can easily be avoided by giving only as much as they can collect in 20 minutes or half an hour : An insect submerged in honey water stop simply fresh air intake , slow its metabolism to a near dead and so if they are out of water and clean by other workers within half an hour they come back to life as normal.