ANTSTORE World of Ants

[ffoott]

Hello. I am interested in the species above. But the problem is that when i was trying to order it from a certain website, they told the species was particulary hard to get because they didnt mate in the tradicional way, nupcial flights. Can anyone explain this situation a little better? How do they spread their colonies then? Thank you

[damondeionno]

I looked them up briefly. They reproduce by fission. That means that new colonies bud off from existing colonies. It looks as though groups of workers move to new locations with some brood which they are then able to raise as queens. The workers then lay unfertilised eggs that produce males which fertilise the queens in the nest.

The good news is that this suggests you don't really need a queen. Just a group of workers with some brood. I'm sure you can find some by partially excavating a colony.

This is similar to what happens in honeybees, except that in bees the queen leaves with some of the workers, and the remaining workers raise some queens from the existing brood. In bees there is a cut off point for the brood. If the workers haven't fed the larvae royal jelly by a certain stage in development the larvae will develop into a worker. With this in mind, if you are looking to acquire a colony I would suggest you ensure that you have some very young larvae to maximise chances of success.

I must stress that I have no experience with this species, I'm simply going on what I read.

See:

Hyperlinks sind nur für registrierte Nutzer sichtbar

And

Hyperlinks sind nur für registrierte Nutzer sichtbar