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Hi all,
I have a smallish colony of P. dives. They're doing OK (happy, smiley ant-faces....), but my feeding is guesswork. They get a mix of fresh-dead insects, diluted honey, and their favourite seems to be finely-minced cooked chicken (which, I suspect, is not part of their natural diet!). Sometimes they're greedy, other times they just ignore food.
Can anyone recommend quantities and types of food? Are your dives fussy eaters? What do you feed for greatest colony growth?
Basically flies and crickets. They seem to love flies but its hard to get enough of them.. As you said meat is not their natural diet so i dont feed it.
Yep - they seldom turn down flies. I've tried crickets too (frozen; I usually break them up a little before feeding), and they're not so enthusiastic about those. Also, I've noticed that they'll go crazy for protein (flies/meat) for a while, then ignore it in favour of honey, then vice versa. How big is your colony, and how much/how often do they eat?
My colony might be around 1000+ ants and i feed around 600 medium-sized crickets a month.
Wow! That is a lot. My colony is smaller, but I think I'm under-feeding them. What size crickets do you feed? Do you use them fresh or frozen? (And, if they're fresh, are they dead?). Sorry for all the questions!
Paul
In germany they are called medium sized. So its not the huge ones but also not the micro small ones. ;) I freeze my crickets but i do not stockpile them for long, i usually buy fresh ones every 2 weeks and then freeze those.
Thanks - I'll increase my feeding, I think!
Happy Christmas,
Paul
I'm also curious, I've seen now about 10 ants drinking honey-water, so I'm confident they know where it is if they want it, but they go crazy for crickets I put in- I put in about 4-5 a day (the colony is about 1000 ants). They don't seem to like satsumas, which I had thought they would, so looking for alternatives to try
Well thats the problem when you buy huge colonies, you cant know how much they need. I started with 150 workers and slowly increased food with growing population.... now i feed like 20 crickets daily and they might be at 1000 workers but maybe its only 800, i dont really know...
Do you guys break or crush dead crickets, or feed them whole? Does anyone feed meat and, if so, any comments?