this is my new colony of Formica sanguinea. I have captured these in the heath close to where I live.
I have made an Ytong for them last monday, and they happily settled in there. Soon I will post some more pictures with the whole setup. The colony has 5 queens and one princess/queen (she still has 1 wing left so I do not know if she is fertilized). I think I have about 200-250 workers, I also captured about 10 larvae and 10 pupae. This is a beautiful species, I love their polymorphism and aggressivity. I notice that their small workers are rather shy, and tend to run away from crickets I feed them (I kill them before I do but usually the legs are still twitching) while the big ones really attack right away. Just too bad that they do not get out of the Ytong a lot during the day (probably because it is a fairly small colony).
Here are some pictures, my camera is rather crappy so the quality is very low. I did not resize the pics so I hosted them on imageshack (otherwise they would mess up this page). If I had resized them you would probably be unable to see anything on them. With some imagination you can now discover some ants in the big black blurry mass
. They really hate being disturbed so I took only 2 photos.Hyperlinks sind nur für registrierte Nutzer sichtbar
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I hope that the colony will grow fast with their 5-6 queens! Especially with this hot weather lately... I am "overfeeding" them with crickets, this is not harmful I hope? My F. fusca and M. rubra will not accept any more crickets if they are not hungry anymore so I guess the F. sanguinea will do the same? (But if they keep accepting crickets will they eat too much, or are they still really hungry? I am using size 7 crickets so they are quite big... I guess they are real predators that devour everything
.) Wonderful ants... Maybe I will have my sister make some pictures (she studies photography so she has a nice camera) and post them too. I will keep you posted!Oh and one more small question... I have read that some people steal brood from their F. fusca to give it to their F. sanguinea to become slaves... How do you do this? Once the ants are in the Ytong I do not see how you would get to their pupae. And anyway my F. fusca colony has only 2 queens compared to my F. sanguinea having 5 (or 6), so I think I would harm the fusca's more than help the sanguinea's (they will have a huge growth rate anyway).
. Does anybody have any idea of the development time of F. sanguinea? 1-1.5 months I'd guess? 
). Another thing I noticed was them making the sound by tapping their gasters onto the floor when i accidentally hit the Ytong and they panicked. I think the name was stridulating?
. Does anybody know a good way to take pictures from them without getting them stressed and running all over the place? A bit of light startles them already but the flash makes them go berserk and run all the way into the arena with pupae. I really don't want to give them stress.
