The Great Escape!

Every other day I'll see an ant on the outside of the ant farm. I don't know if they are getting out or if it's a stray ant from the outside stumbling upon the ant farm.I have a funny feeling that it's the former.

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Bring Out Your Dead!

The ants appear to be using the water dish I have in the ant farm as a dumping ground for dead ants. Here is a picture of eight ant bodies floating in the water, one of which seems to be a queen ant with wings.

This day I changed out the old bottle caps with ones with new water and one with a mosquito and some shredded pork. The mosquito was bugging me the previous night and I zapped it with a mosquito zapper. The ants really liked the mosquito because it was gone in about five minutes with just the legs remaining in the bottle cap. The ants also seemed to like the shredded pork, but definitely not as much as the mosquito.

The ants seem to be settling in to their new home fairly nicely. I've spotted some very small eggs, which makes me suspect that I do have a queen ant in there somewhere. I am starting to see little eyes forming on the pupae. Some of them are starting to form clearly visible body parts like heads and legs and are starting to change to a brown color. Very interesting.

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Heading Underground

After I put the ants into the ant farm, they took up residence under a plastic bottle cap that I placed inside to hold food. I changed the bottle cap when I switched out the food last night and the ants started to scurry about frantically, carrying the eggs with them.

This morning, it seems that they've all headed underground and have resettled in a cavity they had previously dug. The cavity is a bit bigger now and all the eggs seem to have been moved to this spot. When they were under the bottle cap, I couldn't see what they were doing. Now I have a very clear view of their activities.

I gave the ants a bit of durian last night. Saw one ant feeding on it last night but none were as of this morning.

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Modifications

I made some modifications to the ant farm. First, I added ventilation by cutting out a hole in the top cap and gluing on one half of an old tea seaper. Secondly, I made a sleeve cover that goes around the outside of the container to block out any light coming in from the sides.

The ants have built up a network of tunnels and cavities into the sand but they have created a shallow burrow just beneath a yogurt bottle cap where they stashed the egg cases. Most of the ants seem to be staying in this shallow cavity, though I have noticed a few hiding in the tunnels they a have built along the sides of the wall of the container.

Been feeding the ants some papaya and pineapple. They seem to love the papaya since it's pretty much all gone by the end of the day. They really munched down on some oats I put in three days ago but they haven't touched it since. I put in a small bit of corned beef, but they didn't touch it. Might have been too salty for their taste.

It's raining out now and most of the ants are hunkered down inside their burrow. Interesting that they seem to sense that it's raining outside and are waiting it out inside.

One strange thing that I have noticed is that a number of ants are constantly wandering around carrying the body of their dead compatriots. I figured that they would have dumped or buried the bodies somewhere, but no, they keep wandering around with the bodies in their mandibles. Kind of freaky if you think about it. I did notice three ant bodies in the water bottle cap that that has water in it. Perhaps that is now their body disposal site.

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My Little Ant Farm

I made a little ant farm out of an old Costco nut container. I explain how I made it in the video below. This blog is going to follow how the colony develops over the next few months, if it lasts that long.

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