Arrival
The Colony arrived in November 06. There weren't any eggs, larvae and pupae. But this should change. 8 weeks later the first workers appeared.
Development was fine. Soon there was a really big larvae visible. At this point the activity outside of the test tube was very rare. Couldn't see any ants outside, only noticed over night some of the seeds were gone. But honey and dead insects were ignored.
First problems
Some weeks later the big larvae turned out to be a nice Media Worker. I was wondering about media workers so early... but still i was happy. This happiness didn't last very long. There was allways brood, but no new workers appearing. Actually i found some dead workers with ripped of head or thorax. This went and on until only the Media worker and one minor worker were left. By accidentl i killed the media worker which somehow solved the problem. So in retrospectiv i guess the problem was the media worker gone postal. This was in August 07. From now on the colony developed great.
In November 2007 there were about 50 workers. Eating a lot of seeds and having a big pile stored in their test tube.
Still they're not interested in honey. Their favourite dish is drosophilas.
But they also like fly pupae.
In feburary 08 there were about 70 workers. They eat more and more dead insects and still life in the testtube.
But then some day later i saw a worker exploring the Ytong nest. Over night they completly moved into their new nest
The queen in her new castle
Colony in April 2008
The first major workers with a size of 10mm appeared.
next problem
The glass on the ytong nest started to lose grip and became permeable. Epoxy resin shouldn't be used to glue a glass on the Ytong. From now on only Silicon!
As a lazy human being i took my time for building a new Nest. Here a picture of the arena.
Here you can see the polymorphism of this specie
But some day it was finished
A picture of the queen in the new nest.
And an overview with arena on the left and nest on the right
look inside the nest in June 08
Now it's July
After that August
You allready guessed it: September
A did a small video showing the development over the time.
Either Hyperlinks sind nur für registrierte Nutzer sichtbar in good quality
or youtube
[youtube]iN4QVVgMX4Q&ap=%2526fmt%3D18[/youtube]
Garbagepile
Interesting to see that sometimes they are moving the whole pile to another place over night.
You've seen it on the picture in september. Nest is to small. So they started to dig new nests in arena
2 sisters
Some time later they dug a second nest in the arena
Time for a new nestblock.
Few days later the new nest block was fully occupied.
Another picture of new nest block
and the whole complex
another picture of nest
yummi, antbread
and more brood
Interesting to see what a small queen can produce. Hope you liked that little review of 2 years of keeping Messor alexandri. Any comments or questions? Feel free to post below
