Hunners of stuff

Lots of things have happened since last time, some of it rather exciting if I do say so myself. It will probably read like a disjointed pile of poop, but here goes :)

Ant Disney
The stuff arrived, 5 magnifying tubs and 2 meters of tubing. I attached one length of tubing to the empty side of the ant farm and placed a magnifying box at the end.

Coz I’m pure ded brainy I read on t’internet that ants move the rubbish away from their nest. I hoped that they would move the rubbish (dead ants like Robert and well, ant poop, they must poop…) to the furthest away tub so I could do science type stuff with it.
When I left this morning they were just running up and down the helter skelter type tube, so we will see what they do.

New ants / Ant hunt
Weeeeeeee, new ants. Which I managed to capture using only my wit, cunning and some more wit. Well, cunning, wit, a spoon, a tub and a Karen…. But mostly the spoon.

They are the same species as my other ant’s lasius niger, but they are a good bitty bigger, at least twice the size. There is also a queen who I have named Tweedlie, she is about 10 to 15 times bigger then the workers in my first colony. Because I have her it means the colony can grow and she can have lots of lil baby ants that will ultimately grow up, leave home and become a disappointment to her.

So I spent 20 odd mins digging them up and now there all mines… woo ha ha.

About 30cm from the colony I dug up I found another one, under a rock. I coldnt see the queen but there were about 30 ants and about 50 eggs all in differnet stages. I might go back and get them at a later date, i think these ones might sting :)

The Transfer
After getting them hone I had to transfer the ants from my hunting tub to a better container. I bought a 4ltr Tupperware tub from ASDA. I had read that if you put a line of Vaseline around the top of the containers you are keeping ants in that they can’t get grip to cross it.

I tipped the contents of the hunting tub into the large Vaselined one and looked at Karen (Who was taking photos) and said with a slight giggle in my voice “look how pissed off they are” as 100+ ants swarmed out and over the lump of peat and over the Vaseline line. Karen was of no help AT ALL squeaking like a poof of a girl while running away. I hadn’t realised that I had caught so many.

Well, two managed to escape before I got the lid back on, luckily I managed to catch them quickly and pop them back in with out squashing them with my fat clumsy fingers.

I’ve decided the new tub is crap, so I’m going to buy a new ant farm and transfer over the 100+ ants, 60 odd eggs and Queen Tweedlie, I’m not sure how the hell that’s going to work though. Answers on a post card.

Food
Raw turkey, I got a tiny bit of turkey for the ants, and fed them is just as I was heading to bed. I got back from brushing am teeth and other dooings… And they had swarmed all over it. I counted 15 ants on the turkey compared to 3 ants on the coco pops. At this point I can’t say what is their preferred food, it’s a toss up between raw turkey and strawberries.

They like rasins, or sultanas, no idea what it was.... one of the kids left it smooshed into the carpet :)

Ants love coco pops

First off, no one has left one comment, 600 hits and not one bloomin comment. Even if its just out of pitty, gonna leave one.

I feel I'm making a real contribution to science here, I have now discovered that ants LOVE coco pops. By the looks of it they like coco pops more than they like strawberries.

I was heading to bed and decided to throw out the strawberry because it was going kinda fuzzy. So I cleaned out the tub and place 1 triple and 2 double coco pops just to see if they would eat them, I had read they only really like smooshy food.

In went for a pee and to brush my teeth then came back to this. They were swarming all over it… cool hu.


Update
I managed to get a photograph of robert, as you can see he is dead with his little and legs pointing up in the air. I cant get th body out, I'll need to borrow some tweezers or something. I'm sure all his buddies will miss him..... Brave lil guy.....

Diggy dig dig

I’ve ordered (well I had someone order them for me posing as the mother of a small child to save us any embarrassment) 5 magnifying boxes and 2 meters of tubing to allow me to expand my ant farm to something magical, kind of like Disney World but for ants. They should be here in the next few days.

The magnifying box which I placed the moss in last week had started to steam up to I took the lid off to wipe the condensation off and I noticed that there was lots of bits of dirt in the bottom of the box. I lifted up the moss to find two ants hanging out a tunnel which had been dug through the dirt attached to the moss. The only thing I can think of is that the moss was in the way of the most direct route to the food. The blue line represents they route they had to take before the tunnel was built and the orange shows the route of the tunnel. Smart little buggers eh…

Death
There is at least one dead ant, a prett big one so I'm guessing it was old age. We will call him Robert Paulson.

Food
Ants don’t like gammon, so fear not your pigs are safe, but look after our chickens and strawberries; so far they are the ants favourite food.

The jumpy thing ( Mr Flea )

I decided to add on the second magnifying box which gave the ants a little bit more room to run about in, they seemed to get very excited and half (20) of them came out to investigate. I took some short movies [Movie 1] [Movie 2]

Ping, if and empty box got them excited, I wonder how excited they would be by stuff…….. garden stuff.

So I got a dod of moss, bit of wood and some grass and popped them in the empty box. They went crazy for it. Running about like hundreds of crazy little bastards, they didn’t know what to do. Until they found the jumpy thing.

It was semi translucent, about the size of a flea, and jumped like a flea, I’m going to refer to it as…. Mr Flea.

The ants swarmed all over the moss which flushed the flea out of it hiding place, PING, Mr Flea shot across the box braining himself off the lid. The ants didn’t chase him, I thought the little guy might be ok.

So he pinged about for a few minutes, until he landed right in front of one of the ants which grabbed him. I think Mr Flea was killed right away, I don’t think he suffered. Rip Mr Flea

Apart from Mr Flea I’ve been feeding the ants a bit of dog chew, I think it’s a pedigree chum shmacko. They like it.

Daddy or chips, jelly or meat?

I finally managed to disconnect the magnifying box the ants came in, the first time its been totally empty since they arrived. Trying to figure out what to do with the empty box now.

I removed the covers that I had put in place to make the lower section dark and encourage the ants to dig, this picture shows what they have been up too, this one I have marked with green to show where they have been digging.

Its getting exciting, well for me anyway :)

Feeding time
I cleaned out the banana and left them a day without food, then as a treat I gave them jelly, I can't say they were overly impressed with it.

I'm sure they were eating it, just one or two at a time though.


So today I put in a small bit of sliced turkey and they were all over it, I counted 18 on the meat at one time. Click here to see a larger pic of the mini swarm.

The age old queston as now been answerd, now if anyone asks, you will know that ants prefer turkey to jelly hands down.....

Eggs, eggs, eggs... oh, N' some diggin

They little buggers have eggs, Ive seen at least 5 eggs.

All the ants (that I've seen) are the same size, so im 99.9% sure there isnt a queen. Still, they have started digging now tht ive covered both sides over with card.

Ive just noticed that there is a gap at the bottom of the card and I can see ants scurrying about at the bottom of the tank. cool :D

I havent got a pic of the eggs yet, but there is a bigger version of the pic to the left here.

Huddle

They are just huddled up together, doing... well not much.

I have placed card on one side to make the sand section darker to see if they will dig. They will also be living under my computer desk for a few days while people coime to view the house, ants arn't a big selling point. :)

4.5 Dead ants

4 and a half dead ants, not sure where the half came from....... and still no digging.

Workers not workin

There not really doing much today, they are all still huddled up in a corner of the antfarm above ground. No digging yet.

There are 2 casulties so far, well one an a bit. They have moved the dead things to one corner, as far away as possible from the bit where they hang out.

Anyone got any idea how to get them to tunnel?

There heeerrreee

I called home to see if there was any info about the house sale and the ants are here.

Well, I'm guessing it's the ants, they are in a jiffy bag marked "Live animals" so unless somone else in the house ordered a very small lion or somethign similar in my name then i think its safe to say they have arrived :)

Urgent Live creatures

** Got interupted so more images to follow **

The poor wee buggers arrived in a small jiffy bag, but they are really pretty cool. I took a few photographs of them in the shipping tub / magnifying box, but they came out blurred. If you zoom into 100% you can see some shiny ant asses.

Had a slight panic, I lost the tub for about 10 minutes while I was eating cake. Short lived panic though I found them under a newspaper. Further examination of the tub showed that the ants came with a bonus bit of worm (dead) and only one ant death so far.

So, I followed the instruction booklet and mixed the sand and mud with some water until it had the consistency similar to that of a sand castle and pour the mixture into the ant farm. Pour my arse, you ever tried to pour a sand castle into a 1mm X 4mm hole…. Snot easy.

The ant farm was ready, I popped the ants into the fridge for ten minutes (I read it on the tinternet, slows them down) and then plugged the tub into the main ant farm.

First 10 Minutes
Nothing, they are all huddled in a ball still in the original tub.

First 20 minutes
Movement, one ant (who I have named Barry) went down the tube into the main ant farm. Barry made it to the middle of the ant farm and then just stopped. See big barry.

First 30 minutes
Barry is still sitting in the middle of the ant farm, still no real movement from the others.

Things are going slowly so I decided to try two things to wake them up and get them moving, both very scientific.

I added a lump of banana to a feeding box (came with the kit) and plugged it into the opposite side of the ant farm after about 30 seconds Barrys antennae went mental, flicking about… then Barry just continued to sit… and do nothing…

The second thing I did to get the lazy bastard worker ants to live up to their name was to covered the tube closest to them with my sock which I had just removed. Here comes the science bit :). I theorised that the warmth and darkness provided by the sock would be more inviting than a magnifying box which they were sharing with a bit of dead worm.

I was right, 15 mins later they were all huddled together in the tube, I tried the same tatic to get them into the farm, that worked too….. :)

I’m heading to bed now and this is how the ants look just now. They appear to be feeding from the banana ok, but only a few of them are going to the banana and it looks like they are feeding the rest.