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 :)