ANTSTORE World of Ants

[Deanola]

How comes the English forum is so quiet?

Is there nobody here keeping aants at the moment?

[Azzer]

I guess nobody has much to say!

Deanola - My Mum was down in London this weekend just past - says she saw the pre-nup flight (over in the Ealing part of London anyway - though she's no ant expert, just what she's picked up from me to spot - sounds like it from what she described) - was she right? And did you catch any fresh queenies if so?

My own new colony seems to be thriving - the feeding area definitely seems escape proof now after I added the glazier's insulation tape around the sides, and the ants seem to really like it. I've noticed very odd behaviour though - they seem rather addicted to the empty snail shells I put in the feeding area! I've seen them carrying a large egg that came with the colony back and forth between the two shells a few times with lot's of activity, and often have seen ants disappear in to a shell and not re-appear again, and likewise pop out of a shell from apparently nowhere and head off to the colony area. The queen also seems very well settled in the colony area - they've dug right down to the clay, and made quite a few side-tunnels, and they've built new tunnels above the sand (eg they built up the sides by half a centimetre or so, then put a "roof" over it) which they seemed to do extremely rapidly for such a minute and new colony. Also have spotted a very large pile of eggs inside the main colony area where I know the queen to be on Saturday (seemed to appear quite quickly, I can only assume they'd been hiding them until Saturday morning, when they got pushed up to the side) - at a guesstimate around 30 eggs - so a very promising sign that the queen is happy and stable after the move, and hopefully that this colony will thrive in time.

[Deanola]

Alright Azzer,

What species do you have? Good to hear your queens settled ok, When i get a new colony, i get quite anxious about their health, i try not to interfere too much though. This last couple of weeks, i've got two new colonies and i've been on edge ever since, trying to make sure their eating and that the temperatures are right, like an old hen!

We didnt have the pre nup flights where i live in North London as the weather wasnt good enough, We did have big swarms of pre nups here a couple of weeks ago during the heatwave! I only caught a couple of Lasius flavus queens, we had thousands of Lasius niger queens flying about.

Last year i caught lots of Lasius flavus, this year, there were very few! I've not yet seen any Myrmica rubra flights, maybe their too small?

i have one Lasius flavus queen with her eggs, dont know what im gonna do with her though as i dont really keep British species anymore and i dont really have room for another colony at the moment.