A very sad day!

[MadVampy]

So I can home and was going to feed my little ant family a cricket............ Only to find the entire nest over run with the common black ant (Sugar ants, piss ants, Pharaoh, Pavement, what ever you want to call them). And thru out the nest was parts of my Solenopsis ants spread all over..... including the queen and the little ants were carrying off the brood and going after the food in the out world. I had the air vents covered with very fine mesh (far too small for my ants to get out but not too small for the black ants to get thru), I even have the vents surrounded with Vaseline as a back up.

So my growing Solenopsis colony has been wiped out. I'm so mad right now.

All caught queens dead, colony wiped out........... not been a very good time.

[Antloveforever]

The name of the pavement ants is tetramorium

[MadVampy]

And I figured that it but was too mad to care about their name at that point.

[StrawHat]

I sympathise with you Vampy, Both my Solenopsis and Otodomachus queens have been taken up to the big ant hill in the sky. My Otodomachus died from unknown reasons and my Solenopsis died from a mold breakout. Well, you can only hope for a better go at it next time, at least you get the experience on your belt.

[CreeperUniverse]

So I can home and was going to feed my little ant family a cricket............ Only to find the entire nest over run with the common black ant (Sugar ants, piss ants, Pharaoh, Pavement, what ever you want to call them). And thru out the nest was parts of my Solenopsis ants spread all over..... including the queen and the little ants were carrying off the brood and going after the food in the out world. I had the air vents covered with very fine mesh (far too small for my ants to get out but not too small for the black ants to get thru), I even have the vents surrounded with Vaseline as a back up.

So my growing Solenopsis colony has been wiped out. I'm so mad right now.

All caught queens dead, colony wiped out........... not been a very good time.

Did you kill those little bastards?

[Batspiderfish]

Sorry to hear that. I remember I was raising a two-queen Lasius subumbratus colony and everything was going really great, but then a single Camponotus pennsylvanicus major fell into their outworld and killed every single ant in there while I was at work. You'd think a 40 worker colony would stand more of a chance.

[Cale3459]

I had a growing colony of Camponotus that suffered a full on collapse within two days. Managed to get the Queen and a worker to move into a test tube with the two pupae she had and when I was disassembling the formicarium to clean it I discovered them nesting in the cotton. I'm pretty sure that's what nearly killed my colony.