Cleaning ant graveyards

[Whitelotus]

My Tetramorium colony has recently begun to place their fallen sisters in little divots of sand within my formicarium. The formicarium is filled with sand is is difficult to properly clean without harming some of the other ants. Anyone have any tips?

[Hunter36o]

Monitor it a bit more first. Ants have less active hours throughout the day and if you catch that time you should have better luck at cleaning out an area of the formicarium depending on the shape and design that is.
For my ants, early afternoon is a quiet time so I generally do my cleaning then. Hope this helps.

[JoeHostile1]

Ants like to dump in the same place. So once you have it cleaned out maybe you can put in a little tray or piece of tinfoil or something that you can easily take out and dump.

As far as there just being too many ants walking around the garbage pile, well you will realize that with Tetramorium sacrifices have to be made. Those colonies get so big plus once they reach a certain size there will always be workers walking around the garbage pile. You could try and scare them away by clapping, but that might cause the whole nest to freak out.

Me I just use a little hand held vacuum when cleaning the garbage pile and a bunch of ants get sucked up in the process. I justify it because Number 1 my colony has several thousand workers so losing a dozen or so every couple weeks literally has no effect on the colony. And every spring these tetramorium workers come out of their nests and battle their neighbouring tetramorium colonies for territory. So a colony in the wild would lose hundreds possibly thousands of workers in these battles. In captivity they lose none.

[Whitelotus]

Thanks for the tips you guys. I will try a vacuum and monitor their activity when I get the chance.