Roach for Breakfast

Found the ants tearing a cockroach apart on the balcony one morning. Funny how they would barely touch any roach I gave them while they were in an ant farm. In the wild, they seem to devour anything they come across. Perhaps they are much hungrier in a natural environment where food isn't handed to them on a platter like in an ant farm.
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Ants Farming Aphids

I noticed a ton of ants on a little hot pepper plant that is growing on my balcony. Upon closer inspection I saw that there were tending to a ton of aphids all over the underside of the leaves. Apparently they are farming these aphids for a sweet liquid they secrete.
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Instant Noodle Ant Farm

Boy am I good. I have been raising ants in yet another ant farm and I didn't even know it! For the past few mornings I've noticed a stream of tiny slow moving ants coming out to drink water from a mug I leave on a kitchen table. By eveningtime the ants are gone, only to appear again in the morning.

One morning, I followed the ants away from the mug to an unopened instant noodle container. Lo and behold, the ants had found their way through the plastic wrapper and made a little hole through the paper container. It looks like they are living in the instant noodle cup. I'm sure they are pretty happy living among a ton of food. Instant noodles are pretty salty. No wonder why they always come out to get a drink in the morning.

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Day 32: Status Check

It's day 32 since I started this ant farm. The ants have enlarged their underground chambers considerably and are now starting to bore tunnels towards the center of the ant farm to where I can't easily see their activities. This video shows just how much digging these ants have done so far.

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Cookies and Roaches

I think I finally have found out what the ants really like to eat. Cookies and roaches

I put in a small roach that I killed last night and by today, the head and most of the smaller legs were gone. The ants had stuffed the head down a tunnel close to where the body of the roach lay.

After I placed small bit of cookie inside, a bunch of ants started crawling all over it.

I noticed that ants crawling over the roach and cookie all had their heads faced up with mandibles wide open when I moved my head in for a closer look. They just stopped what they were doing and seemed to be warning me not to look at them. Interesting.

The ants are developing nicely. A bunch have now ended their pupae stage and are now walking about as adult ants. Haven't seen too many out topside foraging, though from what I've read, mostly the older and more likely to die ants go out to forage since the risk of disappearing or dying are greater for that of foragers. The youngest ants apparently start out with caregiving duty.

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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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Menu

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly the ants like to eat. Here we have a platter of some steel cut oatmeal, a bit of spring roll wrapper, a nice big dead bug, a piece of Chinese medicine-like dried fruit that is good for your throat, and some nice sweet grapefruit juice.

Some of ants seem to like the grapefruit juice but it's not an overwhelming success like I expected. They really, really like freshly killed mosquitos, especially ones that are freshly gored on my blood. Every time I put a plump mosquito in, it's gone in 60 seconds.

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Queen!

The ants continue to tunnel merrily away. They have extended a tunnel downward to the right of the largest chamber where they are keeping the majority of developing eggs. I noticed that there are very tiny eggs sticking to the wall of the ant farm, so I think I do have a queen ant in there somewhere, though I can't really tell from looking at just the ants.
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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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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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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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