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Can ants see any of the light that passes through them at all? I've wrapped red filters round the test tubes containing the queens I've caught this year, but I'm not sure whether that on its own is enough to make them dark enough, or whether I need to cover them completely with something dark. It's nice to be able to see the queens without having to disrupt them by taking off a cover.
In the failed test tube colony I attempted last year, I sometime shone a torch at the tube (also lined with a red filter) to see how the queen and her eggs were getting on (for the record, none of the eggs ever hatched). I'm not sure, but I suspect she could see the light, even through the filter. What do you all think?
I wonder that too. I use a torch with a filter attached and I swear the queens notice it.
My current setup is a few test tubes (one per queen), each wrapped in red filter, lying on a shelf with a sheet of red filter on top of them. Some ambient light will creep under the gap below the filter sheet, but will hopefully be blocked by the filters wrapped round the test tubes. The tubes are a couple of inches apart, so hopefully the queens cannot see each other through the filters.
It seems to me that they notice when I approach the test tubes. They tend to hang out near the water reservoirs in their tubes, which is where I'm expecting them to lay their eggs (that's what the queen did in last year's failed colony), but when I come to look at them, after maybe ten seconds or so they sometimes wander up to the other end of the tube (the end closest to me). It doesn't seem to matter much whether I tread heavily or touch the shelves. Last year, shining a torch into the tube seemed to make the queen even more likely to react to me being near, which is why I'm going to try to avoid doing it this year. I'm surprised though; I even always covered the torch beam with a red filter! You'd think shining red light through a red filter would not bother the ants.
I've heard a lot of mixed response from people about the red filter thing, logically insects are much more ultra violet end of the spectrum focused so they shouldn't be able to see righht the red end, especially as sight is not their primary sensor. But I keep hearing that people's ants are reacting to red filtered light.
Naturally, a red filter doesn't block out all the light, but it's a very good compensation of being able to see your ants and not getting them bothered from the light. Personally I find in most of my ants that they get used to light and currently I have no filter or cover on my biggest M. minor hespirius colony at all, and they don't mind a bit, infact sometimes they move brood into the midst of the arena because it's often moister than their main nest.
And the bigger a colony gets, the less they seem to care about keeping their nest blocked from light.
Most queens will lay eggs regardless of if it's light or dark, so it can in some cases be preferrable to get the queens used to light at an early stage.
Though, that said: No-one likes to have a torch aimed right a them or bare sun right down on the nest is not a good idea either.
Above statements based on my own observations, naturally. And ants should be treated on a speciment by speciment basis, just because your last L. niger ant liked one atmosphere, doens't mean the next will accept it too. :P