Well, it's anting season again in Florida and I'm finally starting to capture the first queens of 2010. I've always been interested in ants since I was 8, and have had numerous milton antfarms over the past years. Maybe 6 of them, and each with 25 ordered ants. But just a year ago, after my 7th set of ordered ants died. It got really boring....watching ants tunnel was fun at first....but they only lived about a month or two! I wanted a continuous supply of ants and I also wanted to see their full behavior, caring for the queen, brood, and eventually rearing reproductive alates. (Fancy word for winged ants) So I did a little research...and I found out ant colonies were pretty popular in the UK. Because many ants can't tolerate the chilly winters there, it was comepletely legal to ship non-native and native ants there. While that is illegal in the US...because of the risk of introducing more ants like the fire ant and argentine ant. There were several online stores for shipping formicariums (Another fancy word for antfarm
) live queens, full ant colonies, and plenty more. That got me really jealous. After a few more weeks I finally found a reliable AMERICAN ant forum, which was pretty much the only US ant forum. I learned I could either attempt to capture a colony by digging (Not reliable, can easily squish the queen(s) and lose them in the dirt) or in wood (Pretty easy, good for capturing capenter ants) or the hard part, wait for a nuptail flight. Now just about everyone has seen these....you know, flying ants. They all come swarming out of their mound and fly into the air to mate. In other parts of the US that isn't hard, but in Florida that's a different story. Nuptial flights usually take place during spring-fall and happen on warm and humid days....well, if you've ever been to FL you know every day is warm and humid. Meaning nuptails can happen ANYTIME....but they mostly happen art night here. Anyways, to make a long story short I had about 18 colonies last year, but the heatpad I had them under malfunctioned and fried them all. So I had to wait till now, and I finally got my hands on a few queens. And a mature colony that has finally become active. My friend who I met on the USA ant forum (Also known as Mikey Bustos from canadian idol, he also loves ants when not singing) has opened an online store that sells quailty formicarys for ants to the USA, though pricey they are well worth it for me. I own a few now. His ant site - http://www.mikeybustos.ca/antscanada.asp
Here's one of the 4 queens I caught the other night, after she laid her first batch of eggs. (Species Dorymyrmex bureni, common name: cone ant or pryamid ant)
Here's one of the 4 queens I caught the other night, after she laid her first batch of eggs. (Species Dorymyrmex bureni, common name: cone ant or pryamid ant)
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