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I need some advice on feeding insects (caterpillars, mealworms, spiders) to my small lasius niger colony.
Do they eat them alive ? I put a live spider in and then panicked and thought that IT might eat the ants !!! So I took it out again
Then I put a live mealworm in and it wriggled off somewhere. I found it 2 days later still alive and took it out.
So now I am just sticking to pear and honey water - but they will need some protein...
Any advice welcome
Emilia :D
Kill the insects befoe u feed them to the ants.
Yes they need protein. ;)
It is better to kill the insects before you give them, even better is to put them a few seconds in boiling water, so you kill of al bacteria.
Spiders you can give dead, meal worms you need to cut in two the shield is to hard for Lasius niger to cut trough.
Why boil insects ??? ... in nature ants have not boiling water :lol: :lol: ... and I think this methods are a bit stupid ;) (sry Jimmy)
Yes you must kill insects before , I killing them mannualy with tweezers ;) ... if you´ll get alive insect into nest or arena , insect can injure your ants !!
It is not necessary to boil them but it kills of all the bacteria. No i know in nature the ants have no boiling water, but you can not compare it with ants in captivity, they have a lot in nature they don't have in the farms we keep them in. Also if you keep species they are not common in nature (like exotic) and you give them food from you country it could be that the bacteria on the food kill the ants.
So like you said, it is not necessary but it is always better to do so.
Its not only because of the bacteria, its also because of the risk of infecting the ants with mites!
if you dont want to feed them bugs,why not try protein jelly,its has all the bits and bobs ants need to stay healthy
For small, very young colonies it is better to give dead insects, but larger ones can kill almost anything. It depends of ant size, single ants hunt only insects similar of their size or smaller, and only large colonies forage in teams able to kill something bigger.
Boiling insects is a bit too much caution for me, as Skippy said, they don't do such things in nature. That's true, there is some risk of infecting with parasites, but this risk is really small and healthy colony should be immune to them. You probably never can make the ants completely safe until you keep them in sterile box - but in formicarium with more natural environment there is always a lot of little creatures like springtails, non-parasitic mites, very small insects, and ants will sometimes eat them anyway.
Instead of Protein-jelly, you could also try it with Milk.
I asked in the german board today, if someone offered milk to his ants.
The user "Gubischubi" answered:
I have offered milk to a Camponotus l. queen, she accepted it
boiling water is an easy way to kill stuff too. just dump them in, no need for any messing crushing.