My adventure with a Formica cunicularia colony started the 6th July ’21, when I found my first winged ant queen after a couple of weeks of search:
I was always interested in keeping ants since I was a children, and my interest grew over time until I found an italian youtube channel dedicated to this hobby called Ants Italia.
After I went home I positioned the freshly mated queen in a test tube setup, the standard way of handling this species (and the majority of them).
In nature the claustral queens find a spot to dig and hide until the first generation of workers is born, without eating. After keeping her quiet and in the dark in her test tube for a couple of weeks I checked on her and found out that she laid some eggs, that became workers after less than a month!
In another month, the workers became near 20 and it started to be difficult feeding them in the test tube. It’s not something you should do to keep them peaceful, but I found myself to give them a plaster formicarium after a couple of tentative transfers gone very bad.
Even if their accomodation wasn’t ideal, they felt home and the queen started laying a lot of eggs until they reached the diapause period with a hundred worker!
The transfer to the new formicarium was very fun to watch, as one particular worker started moving eggs and cocoons in the new home and even took the queen by her mandibles to move her. You can find the video here!
