The Next Generation

A new army is forming under the restless sands of the ant farm. Over half of the eggs that I collected from the orignal ant nest are in their pupal stage with visible appendages and are turning brown in color. This photo is bad, but you can see the light brown colored pupae mixed in with those that are still white in color.

I already see one or two new ants walking about and being groomed by their sisters. I say they are new because they are much lighter in color then their more mature compatriots.

Every time I take off the covering from around the ant farm, ants start moving the pupae into a recessed chamber where I can't view them. I hope that they'll leave most of the eggs/pupae right along the sides where I can see them.

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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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