- Sun Oct 01, 2017 9:50 am
#23346
27th September 2017
I noticed that lately a lot of posts have just been pictures of ants and brood, so here's something different.
How the Lazy Horde manages foraging.




Step 5 would be "drag it into the nest" but that only works when there's no other workers around that drag into different directions. As mentioned in earlier posts teamwork isn't their greatest strength, at least not when it comes to moving stuff around (maybe that'll change in the future though).
Five of them dismembering a fly. They usually cut off the legs before they drag it away - there's so many fly legs in my outworld now :D

Something I noticed is that there's a distinct difference in behavior between the castes. While the minors usually ignore me or run away and the majors have been incredibly shy so far, the medias are different. They are curious and bold and will come to inspect what's going on - one even tried to attack my pincers. It's gonna be interesting to work around in the outworld when there's more of them.
Now for the more "regular" stuff again, although this time a lot has changed.
As you can immediately see most of the pupae are gone and there's a ton of ants now. In fact there's so many ants I consider adding the second nest.
They definitely gonna need it when the current brood - which is scattered all over the entire nest - turns into workers.

There's a lot of pictures of specific nest areas following so I made a map for better orientation.

1) Basically all pupae in the left wing are gone and small larvae took their place. The top left chamber almost empty.

2) The remaining pupae are almost entirely stored in the right wing and the top chamber, together with larvae of all development stages.

3) The top central chamber now contains only a few pupae and the huge batches of eggs and very small just-hatched larvae (actually most of them are tiny larvae as can be seen by them curling or having black dots). There's also always at least two majors in that chamber.

4) A close-up of the upper left chamber.

5) The upper central corridor with lots of small larvae and Queen Barbarianna.

6) The left port area. There's only a few larvae there so hopefully adding the second nest here won't be too much of a hassle.

7) The right port area. This port leads to the outworld so it's not unexpected that there's no brood.

8) More brood in the central hallway.

9) A surprisingly large amount of brood in the lower left corridor just above the hydration mesh.

10) There's even brood on the hydration mesh now. I think they're really running out of space.

11) They did indeed expand the trash pile to the other chamber.

12) Even more brood in the water pipe.

Image from the other direction.

Queen Wednesday has lots and lots of pupae now. Not many workers have yet eclosed yet though.

The Lasius niger colony has just tripled in size. You can clearly spot the light brown fresh workers.

I noticed that lately a lot of posts have just been pictures of ants and brood, so here's something different.
How the Lazy Horde manages foraging.




Step 5 would be "drag it into the nest" but that only works when there's no other workers around that drag into different directions. As mentioned in earlier posts teamwork isn't their greatest strength, at least not when it comes to moving stuff around (maybe that'll change in the future though).
Five of them dismembering a fly. They usually cut off the legs before they drag it away - there's so many fly legs in my outworld now :D

Something I noticed is that there's a distinct difference in behavior between the castes. While the minors usually ignore me or run away and the majors have been incredibly shy so far, the medias are different. They are curious and bold and will come to inspect what's going on - one even tried to attack my pincers. It's gonna be interesting to work around in the outworld when there's more of them.
Now for the more "regular" stuff again, although this time a lot has changed.
As you can immediately see most of the pupae are gone and there's a ton of ants now. In fact there's so many ants I consider adding the second nest.
They definitely gonna need it when the current brood - which is scattered all over the entire nest - turns into workers.

There's a lot of pictures of specific nest areas following so I made a map for better orientation.

1) Basically all pupae in the left wing are gone and small larvae took their place. The top left chamber almost empty.

2) The remaining pupae are almost entirely stored in the right wing and the top chamber, together with larvae of all development stages.

3) The top central chamber now contains only a few pupae and the huge batches of eggs and very small just-hatched larvae (actually most of them are tiny larvae as can be seen by them curling or having black dots). There's also always at least two majors in that chamber.

4) A close-up of the upper left chamber.

5) The upper central corridor with lots of small larvae and Queen Barbarianna.

6) The left port area. There's only a few larvae there so hopefully adding the second nest here won't be too much of a hassle.

7) The right port area. This port leads to the outworld so it's not unexpected that there's no brood.

8) More brood in the central hallway.

9) A surprisingly large amount of brood in the lower left corridor just above the hydration mesh.

10) There's even brood on the hydration mesh now. I think they're really running out of space.

11) They did indeed expand the trash pile to the other chamber.

12) Even more brood in the water pipe.

Image from the other direction.

Queen Wednesday has lots and lots of pupae now. Not many workers have yet eclosed yet though.

The Lasius niger colony has just tripled in size. You can clearly spot the light brown fresh workers.

Join the antkeeping discord chat and visit r/antkeeping!