ANTSTORE World of Ants

[mati]

neat.
that ought to look nice in your livingroom.

[adam james]

Cheers mate , it actually sits along a shelf above my bed lol

[AntsNational]

Love the set-up man it looks fantastic! I noticed that my A. cephalotes colony does extremely well under no heating at all. They seem to do just fine in room temperature & their gardens are growing at an exponential rate. Just putting my two cents into this and I think that after the initial founding stage (when you have 1-3 nicely sized fungus gardens), there is almost no way for this colony to fail. I've seen your attempts at a large number of different species and I'm so happy to see such great success! Great job dude!

Cheers,
Vasi

[adam james]

Hey Vasile , cheers mate , It really depends on the set up and where your colony is kept , some places are too cold for Atta and not many people can sustain a nice room temperature all the time.

My colony wouldn't do well at room temperature because of there nest design, there is no substrate in the setup so the warmth of the fungus gardens adding to the fact the moist air inside would condense on the walls of the spheres due to the temperature difference, over time this will cause puddling and this would quickly rot and kill the gardens. The heat stops this

Cheers for your two cents dude , hows your colony doing ?


Adam

[adam james]

Hello Guys , its been awhile and you will have to forgive my lack of updating as I have been really busy with work , other pets etc due to the weather.

Here's a Quick update on my leaf cutters , sorry no pictures or a video will get some taken in the next few weeks and do a proper update then


The colony is doing exceptionally well , too well in fact as leaves are being consumed at a increasing rate. I stocked up on willow leaves and hawthorn and bagged these all up in time for autumn and the falling of the leaves. The colony so far is still growing in size. The queen is healthy and I see her most days either sitting on top or to the side of the fungus that's in the sphere she resides in.

I have a lot of privet available thanks to my friendly neighbours in the village that use the privet as there hedging but this lasts me a few days until the ants get bored and a swop is needed. Quickly my frozen stock of willow and hawthorn is going down. I may of underestimated the amount I needed.


The colony has another fungus garden that at the moment is taken priority of the rest , it always gets the first leaves and as a result is growing quickly. I have had a few problems with excess condensation which has meant water build up in the connected tubes which has made movement between each sphere hard on the ants. I am going to be working on a solution to this over the coming weeks and think I slight change in design is in order.

I increased the temperature a little in my setup to combat the problem and this worked but as soon as temperature dropped outside the setup so did the temperature around the spheres and this was enough the cause a build up of water again which is over come by cleaning out the tubes. My colony isn't so small anymore and has a healthy amount of major soldiers so would very much like to avoid this process again

Will keep you posted and hope all your colonies are doing great this time of year

Adam

[deansie26]

Hey Adam, what a great thread mate. I'm just starting with my Acromyrmex but I found your thread really interesting and definitely inspires me to think out of the box. Ill defo be trying different idea's when expanding.
Did you first set up have any heating/ thermostat control?

Jamie

[adam james]

Hello mate , when I first kept atta I heated my room but this became expensive lol , in the winter my room gets cold so have found soil warming cables and a thermostats great heating. I use vivarium fans to circulate the warm air

Regards

Adam

[adam james]

Hey guys , Hope you all had a great new year and time over the holidays.

Well my Leaf cutting ant colony are doing great , the population now spans over 5 fungus gardens and now contains several thousand workers .

Due to wanting to maximize space in my heat box I transferred away from the acrylic spheres and managed to relocate the gardens into acrylic boxes. This gave maximum room for the gardens and allowed for much more expansion.

Transferring gardens full of angry biting workers and major soldiers was a task upon itself and I must admit I got bitten a fair few times.

All done, the boxes were lined up and reconnected so that the colony could get back to repairing and growing the gardens.

Due to the colony's large size it has been rather ravenous and I am finding it hard to gather the privet required, My three bushes outside are now cut back to the ground so have managed to persuade some nice neighbours down the road to let me use there hedge

The colony are now very active foraging and forage all day and most the night , here's a video I have just uploaded to you YouTube channel.

[youtube]4dwfIGQTcmc&feature=c4-overview&list=UU60javMmgejklEkoEXfGpZQ[/youtube]


Sorry for the lack of updates guys, been extremely hectic. Will try update when and if I can.


Adam

[deansie26]

Amazing update Adam, colony looks awesome-that's some romantic music lol

[adam james]

Ha ha lol , cheers mate , was a Celtic album I downloaded so liked the music lol

[adam james]

Well howdy guys , I have finished the first part of my Leaf cutting ants set up. Finally my Atta cephalotes have a feeding platform and foraging walk way to be proud off.

My design a acrylic pipe within a pipe to allow a water moat around a central cylinder for the nest entrance, the central cylinder on the feeding platform would allow water in through holes in the base and the central pipe was capped of with a acrylic disc drilled with holes to allow plant stems to be placed in.

So my parts arrived and I set about cutting then gluing the two acrylic pipes. They needed to be water tight so I used a special acrylic glue that welded the acrylic disks in place and I used to heavy bird books to weigh them down while the glue set. It needed 24 hours to become strong.

The next step I was extremely anxious about , all my setup hopes were built around this one task and the out come , were the acrylic pipes watertight.

They were, now time to create the inner sections and add the access hole.
I drilled a hole in the side of the Pipe that was functioning as the nest entrance, I also drilled a hole into the inner section , both holes lined up perfectly which was a must for the next step

I then inserted a smaller acrylic pipe through both access holes and welded glues this in place , I also used the glue to seal the inner pipe in place , thus constructing a gap all around , hopefully to add water later. A hole was added to the front and this was bunged up with a cork for draining the water should it become stagnant and need cleaning.

I then added the rope, with it secure inside the inner pipe and draping up the inside i could work on fastening it around the rim of the inner pipe with wire,

Once complete , the whole thing was put in place and attached to the colony, I held my breath yet again as I filled the gap with water and looked out for leaks.

Thankfully a great success, no leaks took place and all looked great on the inside

The rope walk way was attached , hung from the ceiling by thin but strong fishing line is almost looked like it was hovering in the air.

Finally it went across the room before descending down to the feeding platform

With a nice selection of hawthorn blossom and privet leaves and the fact the foliage is kept nice and fresh from the water below , should give my colony the A+ of leaf cutting ant care.

And finally here's where this setup leads , Through the wall and into my colony's heat box , where many fungus gardens and thousands of ants await.

That's my update for now guys , hopefully I can get the new designed containers ready by this weekend and the ants transferred to them along with the gardens , then I shall complete the second half of my update and start getting a few videos up



Adam

[adam james]

Well guys I have finished the second stage of my leaf cutting ant set up. I set to work gluing the bases to my acrylic pipes , making sure they were weighted down to increase the tightness of the bond.

Once all set 24 hours later I had some rather nice looking containers to house the fungus gardens.

I drilled the holes , added the acrylic collars for joining the tubes and added a black magnetic strip. This was used purely for decorative purpose and to act as a support for the glass lids

transferring the ants was the tricky part. In the end I decided to do this out doors, the cool weather caused the ants to be sluggish while I moved the gardens and this allowed me to find the queen and move all the gardens easily. Once done the whole thing looked pretty sweet

The queen can just be seen in the picture below , she is the dark mass on top with the workers swarmed around her. She will be kept in this container , the tube coming from this has three metal bars in it , allowing workers and leaves to pass through but not her

It wasn't long before the ants had settled , quickly they started to reassemble the damaged gardens and order was established again.

Well that's my update and my new setup for my Atta Cephalotes, will update with videos soon.

take care guys

Adam

[joshjw]

How r they doin u haven't posted in months

[Andie]

Wow Adam you really got this going well now. I'm gonna have to have another go at this at some point.

[adam james]

Thank you Andie , they unfortunately died out mate , queen died.