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.