Will My Colony Rally?

[ydg777777]

Hey all,

Need some encouragement here. For some reason, frequently when I feed my test tube colony a meal worm, they bring it back to their brood and then just leave it there, where it gets all moldy. So I keep linking their test tube to a second test tube, and pray that they eventually move to the clean one. So far, they've done so, but only after a couple weeks each time.

Two days ago, they did the same thing for the third or fourth time. But because they literally just moved to a clean tube, this time, I tried as best I could to use tweezers and extract the carcass. It turned out to be a horrible move. The colony freaked, started coming out of the test tube, and after a frantic half an hour, I lost probably half of the colony trying to get them all back in. I would say I had close to 40 before this happened, and now I have less than 20, maybe closer to 10. Needless to say, I'm pretty devastated right now.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar mishaps and whether they found their colonies to be resilient, or whether the remainder of the colony usually dies out after such a trauma. If it's the latter, I'm prepared to start over. But man, it's been over two years since I've started ant keeping, and I haven't been able to get a single colony to a formicarium yet. Something keeps going wrong in these test tubes, whether it's sudden death from an unknown cause or a rookie mistake that I make. I didn't know this would be so hard, even when I'm trying to be really, really careful!

[Antloverhuman]

The easiest solution to this is attaching a small outworld to the test tube and connect it via a tube or a connector that is big enough that the ants can go through but tight enough that they cant bring the mealworm back.

1)Some of the ways to make this is you can use a fitting tube to connect both the things and inside the tube you can stuff some styrofoam accordingly.

2)You can attach a straw that can allow the ants to go through but thin enough that they dont bring the mealworm back. Outside the straw you can wrap alot of tape so it becomes thick enough to fit the test tube