Lots of boring stuff

God, where to begin. Because it’s been so long since I last updated this is going to be a pretty big update. If your easily bored then you can scroll to he bottom looking at the pretty pictures as you go and read the summary at the bottom of this entry.

There is no order to this at all.

Beetle Cull

The ants have been feasting on the black beetles that I found and squashed in the back garden. It seems I have been a little to efficient in hunting and killing of the beetle.

Like the early American settlers thought about the buffalo I thought the beetles would never run out. Well they kind of have. I have been feeding the ants on lots of kitchen scraps with varied success. They, in their retarded collective wisdom, decided to attack a cheese slice on mass. It was a hot day and the cheese was slightly melted..... several brave ants died in the fight. The cheese slice appeared to be unharmed.

Cheese 1 - 0 Ants

New red ants

Woo, new ants, vicious little buggers too. The swarm over food and attack it. When I left them this morning 10 of them were quite happily stinging and biting a cheese slice to death. See, I said they were vicious. Click here for a larger image of the Lil red buggers in the collecting tub....

The red ants are Myrmica ruginodis found British Isles, and Northern Europe. They are pretty small, smaller than the Tweedlies ant the orphans.

When I got them home they were still in the tub I used to collect them and it looked like one of the ants was being attacked by 3-4 of the others. It turned out to be a queen but by the time I managed to rescue her, killing a

few ants in the process, she only had 3 legs left. I called her tripod :D and put her own her own wee tub….. Stupid thing died though. This species of ant can have up to 100 queens in a colony, so I might not be as buggerd as I initially though.

Tweedlies
The cocoons hatched, they pretty much all hatched on the same day, there were at least 100 ants running bout inside the ant farm. It was pretty cool.

So I fed them some honey. If you ever keep ants don’t feed them honey… it’s a big. Within 10 minutes five of the newly hatched ants had drowned in the honey. I removed the honey and fed them a beetle from the freezer. They seemed to be doing OK.

Honey 1 - 0 Ants

With in a few day I noticed more and more dead ant bodies in the colony’s rubbish pile (yeh they do actually have rubbish piles…. Told you ants were cool). I counted today the three queens Tweedlie, Graham and Chipper and about 10 workers are alive.

I really don’t know what happened, but more than 100 ants died in the space of a few days….I am the Pol Pot of the Tweedlies world which makes me a bit of a shit.

Tweedlies Update
I noticed some green mould sporting a Don King style hair do in the centre of the Tweedlies ant farm. I'm guessing it was food they had stored and not managed to eat before it went mouldy. There was no way for me to remove this mould so i decided the Tweedlies should move home.

I've found the easiest way to move large numbers of ants is to use water as a barrier, stops the ants running off. So poured some water in the bath and opened the ant farm. With in seconds most of the ants were like lemmings off the edge and into the water. I managed to save them all and put them into their new tub.

All three queens survived the Don King mould attack....

I suppose I better get back to work now....

shite :(

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