Random SpeciesK Antkeeping Stuff

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I Found The Queen Out Walking Around part 3

Post: # 18182Post SpeciesK
Fri Mar 17, 2017 5:26 am

By the way, the minors are about 3mm, the majors are longer but mostly bulkier and of course have big heads. The queen is bigger than the major and bulkier but has a normal head and a bigger thorax. And whereas the minors and majors are definite brownish colors, the queen is a dusty camouflage blurry translucent brown color. And is a rebel. :P

Serafine

Re: Random SpeciesK Antkeeping Stuff

Post: # 18192Post Serafine
Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:29 am

Pheidole are highly polygynous and almost always have more than one queen. Their queens are also much more disposable as the ones most other ants have because Pheidole queens usually only live for 1-3 years and there's multiple of them anyway. Also they can breed new queens that mate inside the nest and replace older queens when they die or get killed.

I highly doubt your colony has just one queen. They probably have three or four.

Martialis
Posts: 1576
Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2016 5:30 pm
Location: Indiana

Re: Random SpeciesK Antkeeping Stuff

Post: # 18193Post Martialis
Fri Mar 17, 2017 10:23 am

Serafine wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:29 am
Pheidole are highly polygynous and almost always have more than one queen. Their queens are also much more disposable as the ones most other ants have because Pheidole queens usually only live for 1-3 years and there's multiple of them anyway. Also they can breed new queens that mate inside the nest and replace older queens when they die or get killed.

I highly doubt your colony has just one queen. They probably have three or four.
Thai is very true about tropical Pheidole. I'm not sure about the temperate species.
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SpeciesK

Re: Random SpeciesK Antkeeping Stuff

Post: # 18264Post SpeciesK
Sun Mar 19, 2017 9:42 am

It would be nice to know that there was more than one queen in there, or that they could make as many queens as they want somehow. :)
Since the baby powder layer, and the vaseline layer were not stopping the ants from climbing out, I wiped as much of it as I could off the walls, and even sprayed a little water on it and wiped it off with a paper towel. I don't know how thick the layers are supposed to be to stop ants from getting out of the bucket. I thought the thicker the vaseline the better, but they just walked over it like nothing was there. :x And the powder I thought was working okay until I added more, and I guess I turned it into pavement or something and they walked on it too. There is the possibility that I covered the vaseline in powder or maybe dust and dirt and that is why it didn't work, but I don't know. Maybe its supposed to just be a thin coating on the walls. :geek: Or maybe it won't work on bucket walls. I wiped it all off because the ants have gone pretty inactive again, or they mostly climbed out in the last couple days. :? There still are a few that walk around carrying dirt balls, but maybe now that I give them so much food all the time they don't need to walk around looking so much. Or they are cold, now that its colder and draftier than it was a few days ago.
I bought some thin plastic tubes, I'm not sure what they are for but were in a plumbing supply section at Lowe's and are the right width, that I can cut into sections and glue into the sides of the buckets and then attach 3/8" vinyl tubing to like everyone else uses (well, I don't know the width of the tubing anyone uses but that is what I bought a couple weeks ago anyway) to attach outworlds and things like that. :idea:
I can think of a couple problems with having an ant colony in a bucket, like maybe the bottom layer is saturated with water and putrefying, and I am uncertain what to do about that. Anyway, the problems I see are with ventilation of the dirt. If I did it over then I would put gravel or something on the bottom with a layer of something to keep out the dirt on top, and a tube to suck out any water that trickled through all the dirt into the gravel, and then the dirt over that. But, I have a queen ant so that is all that matters at the moment! :D
I am imagining putting a hole near the bottom with tubing connected to it so the ants can come out the bottom if they want and walk thru the tubing to the top, and that way I could see if there was water sitting in it too, and drain it out if there was. The top is dry from the light shining on it. I never turn off the light, but they seem to only be a little active at certain times of day and not all the time. :idea:

SpeciesK

Re: Random SpeciesK Antkeeping Stuff

Post: # 18300Post SpeciesK
Sun Mar 19, 2017 7:26 pm

I walked around today hoping to find ants flying around or crawling around, so maybe I would find a Winter Ant queen. But didn't see any ants at all. I did find a place with a lot of what looks like ant hills, but none had openings, and I scraped into a few and although the dirt was the right texture (If that makes any sense) there were no ants and no tunnels in the top two inches or so. I suppose they could also be mole hills, some of them anyway, but the dirt was granular and I don't know if moles do that or not. I did see a teeny tiny iridescent green weevil, which I never knew existed anywhere, let alone around here. I call it a weevil because of its tubular mouth, I guess it could be a chubby assassin bug, they have tubular mouths too, but this was bird gourd-shaped and so I figured it was a weevil of some kind. It might have been a millimeter or so, about like a text "o" on here. I also saw three small millipedes under pieces of wood or bark, a hibernating slug (wrapped in a clear jelly shell of some kind), a little _yellowish_ slug that I never knew existed before, some clear eggs of something, and a red color centipede hiding in a crevice in a piece of bark. Also some tiny flying gnat-like bugs, maybe five or six, next to a creek. And that was everything, except a few Cyclops in a puddle that were slowly swimming back and forth, and something else that size that were mating except one was pale orangish and its mate was pale whitish, and they were like short line segments instead of ovals or drops. I never saw them before, I don't know what they are, and was surprised they are two different colors mating in protozoa of some kind. And moss here and there. So I didn't see even one ant but did see other things.

Martialis
Posts: 1576
Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2016 5:30 pm
Location: Indiana

Re: Random SpeciesK Antkeeping Stuff

Post: # 18318Post Martialis
Mon Mar 20, 2017 7:12 am

While ants are becoming more active, they won't fly until late March. We know when Prenolepis fly in Indiana because they were first documented here. :)
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