Well if their taking it then keep giving it to them I suppose. I'm going to increase the amount of food I give my Camps, I might see a major quicker too. How are your Camponotus species coming on?
Milk bottles full of sugar water? What an absurdly giant unit of mesurement is that??? :shock:
Do you litteraly give them like 2 litre full of sugar water?
The males you have should be normal at that stage of the colony, Polyrhachis dives gets first males quite early.
The nest look great.
By the way I always was quite sure that Polyrhachis doesn´t have pupae in cocoons...
x2 Milk bottle tops, by tops he means the lids from the bottles, no mention of 2 litre.
Ah sorry I got it totally wrong. I thought that he was saying that he gave them bottles that were full to the top.
The two litres were a guessed of how much two bottles would contain.
I just thought that it would be unrealistic to give a ant colony that much food. Thanks for the explanation!
Milk bottles full of sugar water? What an absurdly giant unit of mesurement is that??? :shock:
Do you litteraly give them like 2 litre full of sugar water?
The males you have should be normal at that stage of the colony, Polyrhachis dives gets first males quite early.
The nest look great.
By the way I always was quite sure that Polyrhachis doesn´t have pupae in cocoons...
just the bottle tops/ lids although if i used 2 litres i wouldnt have to keep filling them up lol.
Cocoons, or is that the wrong terminology ?
http://www.hawgs.co.uk/files1/ants/dives/pupae.jpg
I saw that picture, you already uploaded it at the Jul 14, 2011.
But I always thought that they didn´t wave a cocoon because they are used to wave the nest. But obviously I was wrong about that.
Can you still look inside the nest like that?
When they make a new section against the glass you can see inside for a few days but then they weave against the glass and you can no longer see. If i covered it perhaps they wouldnt try and enclose it all.
Myrmicinae I think is the term used for the sub species of ants that doesn't spin cocoons. Correct me if I'm wrong tho.
It is right that Myrmicinae don´t have cocoons but Polyrhachis dives belongs to the subfamily of Formicinae which normally has cocoons but in some cases like Oecophylla spp. the silk of the larvae is used to wave a nest. Those larvae can´t wave a cocoon because of that though the Genus Oecophylla belongs to the subfamily of Formicinae.
Since Polyrhachis dives larvae are also used to wave the nest I assumed that they also don´t have cocoons but as we see at the picture Andie posted they have.
Today i to moved the colony into the 45 x 45 x 45 Exo terra that i had promised the ants a while ago. The idea for the move was to cool off the original arena and let them move themselves but i got impatient and decided to take out the nest they had built and replace it into the new home.
I gently began to remove the silk from the glass with a razor blade and suddenly out poured the ants all over the place lol. There were alot more than i was expecting. Fortunatly i had dosed the rim with talcom powder which kept them from getting out, so i just quickly tipped them into the Exo terra.
I had put a piece of 1 inch thick polystyrene into the bottom and just pushed in the bamboo and put orchid bark chipping on top. The idea of having the bamboo was to have a woven nest within it and also to give the ants more surface area but the move ended in a huge rush so i ended up reusing the old nest before they ended up all over my house. The Pic was taken before the move, the ants have settled quickly and are busy repairing the old nest.
http://www.hawgs.co.uk/files1/ants/dives/exo.jpg