Hi all. I've had a colony of Pheidole pallidula for a couple of months now and I wanted to share a bit of my experience so far.
The overall setup of the ant colony is like this:
The vertical formicarium on the left has moist sand in it, with a tube going from there to the island on the right. The point of the tube going round and round the trunk thing is to stop it being too steep for the ants to drag food from the island back to the nest. This setup seems to work reasonably well, with the ants having dug holes in the formicarium, and they seem to forage quite happily on the island. They are quite prone to fall into the water though and I've lost a couple to drowning. In fact, early on I even found the queen floating in the water (I nearly had a heart attack) but she was fine after I fished her out and put her back in the formicarium, and I then blocked the tube to the island for a while until the colony had dug more tunnels in the sand and got more firmly established in the formicarium. The queen hasn't been back to the island as far as I know!
Here's a close-up of the island - not too much to see. I try to keep it dry to discourage them from digging a nest in it:
I initially received about 20 workers (probably about half of whom were majors) with the queen, and now the colony is down to about 12 including the queen what with drownings, and a few other accidents. However, they seem to have dug quite a lot of tunnels already:
Anyway, about a month ago I saw the first eggs. Initially they seemed to have them all in the sort of cave they have dug out of the spoil heap at the top of the main tunnel:
Here you can see both majors and minors around the eggs, with the bum of the queen visible.
So I'm quite keen for the eggs to develop, since the existing workers are slowly being depleted. Here's some questions:
1) How long do eggs of these species take to hatch? How long do they spend in each stage (egg, larva, pupa)?
2) Will the eggs hatch without a heat lamp? I don't do anything to heat the nest at the moment. I live on the south coast of the UK, and the ant farm is in my flat, and it is summer, but it's been cold in the last few days, and I'm worried it will kill the eggs.
3) I feed them on bread soaked in honey, crushed almonds (they seem to like them), woodlice and moths. They seem to love protein, but I thought I read that the adults only need carbohydrate and that protein is for the larva, so I'm a bit confused. Should I be feeding them anything else? I tried to make up a batch of the Bhatkar recipe, but they just seemed to ignore it.
4) What will happen if all my workers die before the eggs hatch? Will the queen be happy to struggle on alone? Will she leave the nest to forage, or will she die without workers?
Thanks.