First time ant keeper worried about his queens

[Phoenix]

You'll Probably Need Someone To Look After Them If You're Away That Long.

[kykel09]

Lasius are fully claustral so it really depends on your workers. The issue with going away at this point is ensuring they have enough food. At first, your queen will feed them from her fat stores but as more workers hatch this will become too taxing on her and she will need to forage. In these founding stages you typically only need to feed your workers a small amount of food, such as a couple of fruit flies or a cricket leg, maybe once a week. But if you're going to be gone for 3 weeks, if too many workers hatch during that time and you're not around to feed them, they may cannibalize the remaining eggs or larvae. I don't see the queen starving to death but if she can't manage the workers in your test tube you may face that kind of an issue.

[feasible]

Photos: https://imgur.com/a/bNiH9

I have a house mate who could feed them but he's away untill the 17th. That would leave 10 days between being fed.

How often should they be being fed at the moment? They're still pretty new. One queen has only one worker, the other 5 (and one that seems to have died; should that concern me?) the workers are no more than 7 days old.

If I fed them again tomorrow, before I leave, would they be ok going 10 days before their next food?

[feasible]

possibly worth adding is that when i fed the Queen with only one worker, the worker stayed by the eggs and the queen ate the sugar water. so seems like maybe that queen's set up doesn't necessarily need regular feeding yet. i dunno.