The AntsCanada Ant Forum's

So I have never kept ants before and I want to try my hand at starting from just one queen and breeding my own colony. My question is, since the whole purpose of keeping a queen in a test tube is to simulate natural underground catacombs, wouldn’t it be just as effective to keep the queen in a formicarium instead? That way, when she starts to build up a colony, I can eventually attach an outworld and they can all explore when they are ready. Instead of transporting them later on and stressing the queen and the workers out. I’m just curious if this would be an ideal plan or if not then I’m curious to find out why not.

It matters the formicarium. if the formicarium is huge you should add dirt or substrate for her to slowly expand her colony. test tubes are just cheaper and easier to find. plus you can store water with out disturbing her. some people have raised queens in other items of course from plant water pickets to tic-tac containers.

The new AntsCanada Ant Tower is perfect for this. It's a soil formicarium so the new queen can excavate her own claustral chamber. As workers come along, they can forage above ground in the upper section of the Ant Tower. Expanding the setup is easy with tubing as well.

ooper01 wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 05, 2018 6:11 pm

The new AntsCanada Ant Tower is perfect for this. It's a soil formicarium so the new queen can excavate her own claustral chamber. As workers come along, they can forage above ground in the upper section of the Ant Tower. Expanding the setup is easy with tubing as well.

This is a good idea. Then later when the colony gets bigger I can get a bigger outworld and try and get the queen to move to a hybrid nest for better viewing later on. Thanks for the suggestion!

Hi, I am adding a link to my Google drive because I have a tupperware container in there with a sand substrate, this seems to be ideal for this queen, although she is not the biggest in my ranks her colony grows the fastest by far, she was the last queen I caught and she had 12 workers before winter. Keeping in mind the queen's caught a month or two before had test tube set ups and only had 16-20 workers before winter. A good count for sure but I feel the queen in the sand would have had way more if caught at the same time.
I like this because I can keep the sand moist enough so the queen and workers can change their nest as they see fit.
If the sand gets too hard they cannot break it up and make new tunnels.
This will be a good set up while you save for the ant tower or hybrid nests.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=17onxTZNudOUrZGNRCwWXKCMvr3xNuz-F