The first thing you notice about this ant apart from its sheer beauty, is its fluffy appearance which comes from the many hairs covering its body. I bought a small colony on the 23 April 2011 containing about 40 ants which also had roughly the same ammount of larvae. They arrived in a wide mouthed plastic test tube with a cork bung in its end. I had prepared a small glass arena about 25 x 10 x 10 cm and laid the tube on the sand within. The ants came straight out and began to attack a dead blue bottle i had put in earlier.
I made a small y-tong nest for them and put it in the arena and within a few hours the whole colony had moved into it but there was no sign of the brood by the next day.
15 May
I noticed two clumps of eggs within the nest.
And with the queen.
29 May
First sign that the eggs had hatched.
8 July
A large solitary larvae, most have been taken into the green aquatic tube that i have exiting the nest. Unfortunatly i can't see whats happening in there, you can also just see a cocoon in the exit hole below.
The nest is a verticle y-tong with 3 chambers on the bottom and 3 at the top. It sits in a flower pot tray for water but the ants prefer to live at the top where it is drier and rarely venture to the bottom, surprising as they are from Taiwan where it is humid. What little information i can find about these is that they like humidity between 50 - 70 RH. I'm keeping them pretty cool too at about 20 - 23c . The nest is connected to a small plastic tub and only very rarely have i seen the odd ant come out to take honey and sugar water and the occassional fruit fly. The colony does seem to have grown slightly so i can only assume that the cocoons have hatched.