About two weeks ago I felt a little guilty about keeping the ants all locked up inside a tiny plastic container, after all they kept insisting on exiting their new little home through the wire mesh on the lid, so I decided to let them have access to the wild open outside world. I stuck a big straw through the wire mesh (securely sealed with hot glue) and then to that attached a big clear plastic tube leading to the outside through a window.
After I completed the connection, I expected the ants to immediately find this new route to the outside and happily stream in and out, so I cleaned out the bits of food that I had placed inside. To my concern, however, they did not wander in and out through the tube but instead seemed to hunker down in their underground terrain, not even coming out to forage within the ant farm itself.
By the end of the first week, I replaced the food bits thinking that they would be starving by now since I still did not see any ants making forays to the outside world. Lo and behold, the ants started munching on the food bits pretty quickly. What I didn't expect, though, was that even tinnier ants started streaming into the ant farm from the outside to get at the bits of shredded pork I had placed. The resident ants all retreated to their underground layer once again and let the small invaders have the run of the place! By the end of the day, all the shredded pork was gone and the tiny ants had moved on.
Last night, I noticed for the first time, a relatively large number of ants moving up and down the tube. Maybe they only come out to forage when the weather is cooler since when I first introduced the tube the weather was fairly warm-hot.
On the inside of the ant farm, I can no longer see any white egg cases so either the ants have move them deeper inside to where I cannot see them or the larva have all developed into adult ants and I was wrong in my assessment that I have a queen ant and that no more eggs are being hatched. I hope that they have just moved them deeper into the nest.
Now that the ants have access to the outside, I shouldn't have to keep feeding them because they can now forage for themselves. I'm kind of curious as to what kinds of things they bring back into the nest because I see some of these same types of ants on my balcony carrying around seeds and bits of plant matter. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
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