Founding ant colony dying

[RiceAnt]

Hi,

I caught queen ants last year in spring (in Australia). I have not been able to identify them, as my phone is not capable of taking pictures with a quality high enough to show enough details.

It has been around 6 months since I got them. About 2 months in, workers hatched, and they were growing steadily in their test tube. However, their numbers have dropped and there are about 10 workers instead of the 18 there should be. Is it normal for them to die within four months? Am I doing something wrong? I have still been feeding them honey (which they eat a bit of), and their water is clean. I only check on them twice a week.

Is this normal until their next batch comes in, or am I somehow speeding up the rate of death for the colony?
If this helps at all: they are small, black ants (not Lasius Niger), and have kindve triangular gastors. They look a little like crematogastors,but I feel like the triangular shape is too narrow to be a crematogastor. The queen is also relatively small.

Do small ants die faster or something?

Anyway, if someone could let me know, that'd be awesome.

thanks!

[bugging3out]

So yeah those workers, they died of old age some workers can only live a month like AntsCanada said.

[Antmanboy]

Small workers don't live as long as large ones in my opinion. I have had a carpenter ant colony for about 7 months now and only about 2-3 have died. I don't know if this is true entirely but that's as far as I know.

[AntsLuxembourg]

Since we don't know the exact antspecies, we have to do a bit of guess work here. I don't know much about what ants could be roaming around in Australia but when I checked the list I think there weren't too many antspecies on the wiki list / map.

Let's say you have a colony that has short lived workers, then there also would be more workers emerging / hatching. or at least there would need to be a bigger pile of eggs and brute, etc. What you could do is to provide them with some protein. This can be achieved by feeding them mealworms or other insects that were prekilled and cut up. Then the ants could feed from them. Or if you don't find a place to get the mealworms / insects from, you could try and softboil an Egg and give them a bit of eggwhite. It's perhaps not as good as the insects but still better than only honey.

I could also imagine that the queen gets a bit stressed with 2 checks per week. Even if it doesn't seem like it, it could be that the queen lays eggs and then eats them as she isn't undisturbed for very long. If possible could you try to take a picture and send it in? Even if the picture is not very good we could still try to guess and lower the amount of possibilities.