ANTSTORE World of Ants

[jon2thefish]

Took me awhile but i check every queen over. Good lord nearly every single one had eggs. As you see from the picture the tubes are split into 5 sections:-

Covered completly with paper towels
Covered a good 2/3's with paper towel
Covered completly with tinfoil
Covered a good 2/3's with tinfoil
No cover (out of direct sunlight/lighting)

Every Queen has been given a file and i'll see now how they progress.

Unfortunately i did find one dead queen, from my lack of experience i cannot say why she died. Looks like i must put this down to nature.

The average egg cluster was between 4-8. out of the 24 queens. 5 queens had no eggs. With one queen having approx 12 eggs and another queen having about 17 eggs.

Within each group half were fed last night with a cotton bud that had been placed into sugar water for a few minutes. Nearly everyone took to it straight away. I squeezed off the excess liquid and placed into the tube and the cotton wool replaced.

Q1 How long can suga water be left in. Will suga and water go off or will it just dry out?

[ashhad1]

I would change it anyway just in case but glad to know your queens are doing good except 1, but that happens
keep us informed

[sithmaster676]

in Norfolk yesterday at around 7 pm the lasius flavus mating flights were so close to happening i watched all of the nests at a time in my garden, and the flying ants were leaving the nest but not flying they all started to swarm but then it got a bit to cold and all went back into there nests.
so im quite unlucky but hopefully today will be the day.
Sithmaster676

[jon2thefish]

Fingers crossed Sithmaster

[ashhad1]

were i am its sunny in morning today but its gonna be heavily raining around lunch or 2pm
I sometimes Hate this weather

[miszt]

dont worry about them to much, if you end up with all your ants having colonys, then you can put the test tube in a dark corner of your garden, prefrably on soil and away from other nests, as you have a few colonys, you wont be able to put them all in one place, remeber in the wild that very few queens would survive

i'm sure you can give them away on here tho anyways once they have a few workers also some schools may like them

[miszt]

I've started a nu site to collect mateing flight information from around the world, please add your siteings! Its very basic at the moment, but i'm building into it a small forum and image gallery, and links to weather reports for each siteing aswell as a few extras the idea is to give people a chance to be able to look in their local area and find nuptial flights for collection or to refrence for the next year so they know what to look for in terms of weather

at the moment there is only a map and markers, but the rest will be up this week


edit: address mite help lol

nuptialflights.110mb.com

[ashhad1]

Well they flew yesterday but most didnt land were I was (strong wind)
But i managed to catch only 2 lasius spec. queens lol

[jon2thefish]

excellent ashhad. If you've got the kinda weather i've got this morning, your probably not going to find many running around today.

[Sam]

Good idea miszt, i'll be sure to add any sightings.

[nortino]

Well yesterday evening (19/07) there was a huge swarm here in Bournemouth . . . I had been getting worried that I had missed them, but I came out of work yesterday about 7pm and nearly trod on a wingless L. Niger queen. Couldn't believe my luck! Collected her and two of her friends, then started to walk home; the pavement was crawling with wingless queens nearly everywhere, and I was really concentrating to not step on any. It's funny seeing how other people (who aren't into ants) are just completely oblivious, whereas I was like a kid in a sweetshop, watching all these queens in their struggle for survival. Saw a few queens getting attacked by gangs of workers from other nests, which was really fascinating . . . if you look you can see that the workers in general are going pretty nuts while the swarm is on, running around near their nests trying to make sure they don't get a rival colony setting up near them. Anyway, I've got the 3 new queens in a testtube and two jam jars respectively, hopefully I'll get some eggs. Any recommendations for how to keep them? I was thinking of getting a Y-tong thing . . . my pheidole pallidula colony are in an upright formicarium so i can see them burrow in the sand, but it's a pain trying to keep the moisture level right . . .

[miszt]

you dont need a ytong for quiet a while, couple of months at least, i'd recomend you transfer the ones in jam jars to test tubes if possible, they are easier to maintain, and once the colony reaches a big enough size they will move out, where as in a jam jar they may deciede to just stay there lol not a major problem tho, no reason why you cant use a jam jar as there home

give the queens a tiny bit of honey and maybe a dead fruit fly to keep their energy up

[jon2thefish]

Look @ the size on this bad-boy of a test tube, measuring 44cm long and 2 cm in diameter. I bet i could keep a colony quite sometime in this thing. Truth be know it's actually a Quartz sleeve from a ultra violet unit, so not a cheap item to use, but i got a few spares kicking around. I might use a couple and see how the colonies get on.

[nortino]

Thanks miszt. I would prefer to use test tubes for all of them, but I've only got 1, and don't know where to buy them . . . someone at work mentioned that Tesco sell some alchoholic beverage in test tubes so I'm going to check it out tonight. I gave them some honey already; they all started chowing down on it straight away. I think I'm going to get an 'ant apartment'; I do like them to be able to tunnel. I'll have to look into better ways of maintaining the moisture - I read something about keeping a layer of clay at the bottom and having a tube down to it to top the water up; anyone have details of how this should work?

[miszt]

or even Glitter tubes from Smiths would do, allot cheaper than buyin alcky, although it is friday night, 2birds one stone etc