Molesta colony small

[KdenKden]

I've had a small solenopsis molesta colony for about a year now. I caught them last year in June and have been raising them until now. However, they never had a colony boom. The queen constantly has about 18 workers or less this entire time. I never had a decrease in workers or increase in workers. They rarely come out to forage and I occasionally feed them fruit flies and some butter. Sometimes when i do feed them fruit flies, they don't come out and mold eventually takes over the dead flies, where then I would have to remove them. Does anyone have any advice in promoting some growth. Brood boosting is no longer an option. They are kept in constant darkness at room temperature, in a 2x2x2 plastic cube dirt/sand container with a smaller container inside to keep the ants towards the sides to see the tunnels. Anything helps! Also scared of using heat as that might damage the plastic, but I am open to any suggestions.

[Hawkeye]

Do you not feed them any sugar based foods? And why butter?

[KdenKden]

Do you not feed them any sugar based foods? And why butter?

They don't really enjoy sugar based food and thief ants typically enjoy to eat grease

[QJH2023]

all ants need some form of sugar and maybe just maybe that's your problem or maybe they don't try fresh fruits or other sugars

[KdenKden]

Update that colony died out that year. But this summer I did managed to catch more queens, they are housed in the same container but with new sand and they have 5 workers with 5 queens. I still have NO IDEA what to feed them, bc they rarely eat. I always see one workers or sometimes even a queen wandering out to forage. Any clue on why there's a worker just out foraging? They don't eat the dead fruit flies I give them and they ignore the honey.

[KdenKden]

Another worker just died while foraging. One of the queens left the chamber and went above ground. I saw the worker attempting to pull the queen ant back into the nest. This queen had a smaller gaster, most likely due to the other ants not feeding her. This colony originally started out with 7 queens, 1 died, and two of them I had to pull out due to this reason: THE QUEEN was killing off the workers. Not sure why, but they would kill workers that were foraging outside alone and then the queen would head back into the nest. I have since removed this queen, which leaves me with 4 queens and about 4 workers with a brood pile.

[antsnewbs]

I've had this species before, but I actually dug up an entire colony from my yard which is about 6-10 queens and thousands of workers, I got rid of them after awhile as they are just way too small to see. But from my experience, they like to eat flies, I just swat a fly fresh, and put it in their nest and they swarm it in massive crowds, dissolving the fly in only a few hours.