More on Tapinoma sessile - combining colonies

Having learned a bit more about Tapinoma sessile, I decided I would try and combine together my two small colonies.  Apparently colonies with multiple queens are quite common, and colonies do not show animosity to each other when they meet.  I thought it was worth a try and the combined colony might be a lot more vigorous. I joined the two test tubes to a common outworld and waited, hoping they wouldn't murder each other. It took about 18 hours for them to interact.  Unfortunately I missed seeing the first contact, which occurred sometime in the middle of the night.  This morning though, there is brood moving.  I no longer have any idea which ants are from which colony, but there doesn't seem to be any animosity at all.  The brood is being moved out of the smaller colony's tube and into the larger colony's tube.  There is a bit of squabbling going on, I watched some workers trying to move a larvae and other workers trying to put her back. But no actual fighting to the point of injury.  The queen of the smaller colony seems calm, though there is no sign of her going anywhere.  If this is successful I am going to try to add a queen with no workers and only brood, who is a year younger.  Hopefully that will increase the longevity of the colony, soon to be super-colony!

A few hours later . . . all the brood has been moved into the larger colonies territory.  Everything is peaceful in that tube.  In the smaller colonies tube, things are a little rougher.  There are a few workers clearly harassing others, I assume ones from the smaller colony are the harassed, maybe the ones that are reluctant to move.  It's starting to look a little violent.  The queen seems to exempt from this so far, and is just chilling at the far end cuddled up to the cotton.

Connecting the two colonies to a single outworld (a small deli container)

The next day. . . the tube from the smaller colony still has the original queen in it, and she is constantly surrounded by 5 or 6 workers that seem to be endlessly harassing her, I assume trying to get her to move out, which she seems very uninterested in doing.  I might have to help this process along, because now she has no brood and the workers aren't particularly caring for her.  I hope this ends well, so far no bloodshed, but I am not sure it will stay that way!

The next next day. . . it all ended badly I am sorry to say.  I joined the two tubes directly together, because the queen from the smaller colony really was in a bad spot either way, all her brood gone, and her workers fled, and the new workers apparently just harassing her to move. But when she did move, and found herself in the tube of the larger colony, the other queen started fighting with her, and then the workers followed suit.  She tried to retreat back to her own tube, and I tried to intervene, but it was two late.  The workers that followed her essentially started ripping her limb from limb, and I rescued her to euthanize her in the freezer, and a few workers with her that I couldn't get out of the tube. A sad day, I feel quite responsible for this disaster. Perhaps they can combine colonies in the great outdoors, but maybe not in the confines of a test tube, or perhaps the circumstances need to be very specific and only queens that are originally nest mates can combine. Who knows, but I won't repeat this experiment!

Tapinoma sessile ant keeping

Tapinoma sessile ants are very common throughout North America, and from the bits of information I have discovered about them, which isn't very much, they often have multiple queens. I have two small colonies of these guys from two summers ago, plus a lot of queens with brood from this last summer, yet to hatch. The queens are about the same size as the Formica limata queens I have previously found, but the workers are tiny, and all the same size. They are actually super cute, but I need a magnifier to see pretty much anything they are doing.  The queen is so much bigger than the workers, they really don't look like they could possibly be related.

Tapinoma sessile queen, workers and brood

One of the issues I have gathered from little bits of info on the ant keeper's forums is that of feeding them protein. While they seem to take liquids, especially sugary liquids quite readily, they apparently aren't keen on much else.  I have had success with with freezing mealworms and then cutting off their heads and dropping them in. They seem to enjoy the fatty material oozing out of the mealworm. So far these guys have been easy to keep. Both of my two year old colonies are still in test tube setups, the larger one has about 20 workers and 30 brood, and the other is much smaller with only 4 worker, and maybe 10 brood. Most of these queens seem to lay a lot of eggs in their first batch.

Two tiny workers and a mealworm lunch

It is my understanding that the queens don't live that long, but queens going off on a nuptial flight may return to their home colony after mating, and so the colony can continue on in this fashion endlessly, though that doesn't work quite so well for keeping these guys in captivity. I may try to join up some of last summers queens and brood with my two colonies, in the hopes of keeping them going longer. These guys are really active, especially later in the day and into the evening, but often during the day all the workers stand very still, almost in a formation, for hours on end, seemingly in a trance.

These colonies are also said to move easily to new nests, and I have found it is easier to move these guys out of a dry or moldy test tube than most of the other colonies I have had.

All in all I find these guys a pleasure to keep and observe.

Division in the Ranks

If you think getting a all-night-music playing, defaulted on the rent, garbage hoarding tenant to move out of your house is hard, try getting an ant colony to move out of a filthy, fungus encrusted, dried up old test tube! I have tried applying heat (usually with catastrophic results due to condensation), applying light, and bashing the tube with something metal to make a horrible noise and vibration.  I have also tried the old be really patient and just wait tactic.  That one seems to take months.  What is it about the moldy old test tube that they cling to so vehemently? I guess us humans do that to, always a bit afraid of change, aren't we?

I find the queen can be much more stubborn than her workers when it comes to moving on. This is where the real hierarchy in ant colonies becomes clear. Queens don't actually rule the kingdom, telling their workers what to do.  Instead the whole colony acts as a super-organism. Or does it?

I have been trying to get a colony of Lasius ants to move out of a really disgusting tube that is dangerously contaminated with mold (that I think came from a maggot that they insisted on carrying into the tube). Well, as you will see in the picture below, the three workers have all moved into the new tube, two days ago! The queen is still hanging out in the old tube, snorting up fungal spores. The workers, to anthropomorphize, seem to be staring longingly in the direction of the wayward mother, as if she is just not functional enough to make an intelligent decision about where she should be.

They are having sex all around you!

By they I mean ants, of course, it's nuptial flight season!  I wish knew how to remove the sound from the following video, my geeky-overexcited-10 year old voice is pretty annoying, but the views of queens and drones (not the electronic kind) emerging is pretty cool:

Only a few days later there were more nuptial flights. I didn't actually observe any of the ants emerging or flying, but was lucky to catch 4 queens. My wife spotted the first queen on our window sill in the living room.  Yup, the queen was nice enough to make things really easy for me and come right into my house.  Not only that, when I placed my container in front of her, she walked right in.  She looks very much like a Camponotus (carpenter ant), though I wouldn't have expected to find anymore of these girls at this time of year.  When I put her in the test tube set up, she did what all the Camponotus queens I have found did, and started diligently trying to remove the cotton:

In the past when I have found queens I have found a whole bunch of a single species.  This time I found only a few of three different species.  Finding the queen inside the house, I immediately ran outside hoping to find more.  I found a couple of more regular sized queens pretty quickly.  Working further up a lane, I spotted an almost worker sized ant that was behaving like a queen - workers tend to move in a zig-zag, random pattern, as they search for food.  Queens tend to run more in a straight line. I decided to grab her.  She went ballistic inside the container, which made me even more convinced she was probably a worker, but decided to hang onto her just in case.  When I moved all four ants into test tube setups, the little ant did the weirdest thing I have yet seen an ant do.  She hit the wet cotton and immediately died.  She completely stopped moving, and looked kind of splayed out, as if I had squashed her.  I watched her for quite awhile and was convinced that was the end of her. I took her back outside to dispose of her by tapping her out of the tube. When she fell out, she hit the ground running! With some effort I caught her again. Under the microscope her wing scars proved her to be of royal heritage.  Here is a shot of my little red queen and the other two types I found for size comparison:

If you are laughing your head off at this point about all this ant-geekiness, and thinking I am just a nut, well selling ants this past year paid for my purple car!  Granted, it's not exactly a Mercedes, but still, my ants bought me a car, how cool is that!

The craziness of ant queen collecting

My wife sent me a text after lunch saying she had found me a really big ant queen on her lunch break, and put it in one of her lunch containers to bring home.  This was incredibly surprising to me, because it is hot and dry today, and hasn't rained in a long time.  Ant nuptial flights seem to occur a day or two after a big rain, so I wouldn't have expected any flights today at all.  From her description it sounded like a Camponotus, which I didn't expect to find in the city ever.  Excited beyond belief that I might be able to find some more, I raced out of the house, sans shoes, and sure enough 10 feet from my door, there was a queen.  Not wanting to miss the window of opportunity I continued to walk around and around my house in a wide semi-circle looking for more.  I can only imagine how insane I must look to my neighbors, who already don't speak to me.  Walking back and forth, up and down the same chunk of side walk, no shoes on, occasionally getting on all fours and chasing something around that they can't see from their vantage point, with a pill bottle.  Then shoving the pill bottle in my pocket and repeating.  Not as bad as the days I bike very slowly through the park on my way home from work, where all my neighbors stroll with their well behaved dogs and children, and then suddenly throw my bike down on the ground and insanely try to find the containers in my backpack, interrupt the flow of pathway traffic, again looking for something tiny on the sidewalk that others can't even see.  More than once I have been asked if I am alright, and when I look up and grinning at them and say "I am fine, I am just collecting ant queens", I am pretty sure they conclude that I am not alright at all!

It was killing me that I couldn't walk further afield, but you see, I am expecting a shipment of spiders today from Montreal, and the delivery man hasn't shown up yet.  I did manage to find three ant queens, and with the one my wife found, that makes four.  Unfortunately they were incredibly hard to convince into the containers, and I might have injured one of them in the process.  They are such incredibly beautiful queens!  Check out the size comparison below between one of my newly collected Camponotus queens (top) and a Tapinoma queen from last summer.

Size comparison Camponotus (top), Tapinoma (bottom).

On ant queens with missing antennae, and ant euthanasia

I have read a few accounts on the survival and success of queen ants that are missing one antennae, and there seems to be varying outcomes, from "nope, died right away" to "did fine, established a flourishing colony".  I decided to weigh in with my own two experiences.  The first queen I found with only one antennae was a beautiful golden orange color, and I wanted her to survive so badly, but after only a couple of days she died.  I don't know if it was antennae related or not, she had no other damage that I could see. The second one was one of about 15 queens I caught in a single day of the species Tapinoma sessile, or the odorous house ant, known for emitting a rotting stench when they feel threatened.  All of these queens produced numerous eggs on the first go, and the first nantics (the first ants born to a queen) have started to eclose and they are very tiny compared to the other species of ants that I have.  My one-antennae queen also produced a large number of eggs and seemed to be doing just fine, grooming them, caring for them just like the others.  I was optimistic that she would create a thriving colony. THEN one day she went on a murderous rampage and turned all of her eggs into mashed potatoes!  She had the exact same environment and same care as her sister queens of the same species, so I really can only blame her one-antennae status for the disturbing behavior.

I decided to put her out of her misery.  The most humane way to kill insects is to freeze them.  As I discovered, this is a little trickier with ants than some other types of insects.  I put her in the freezer for about 30 minutes.  Took her out and set her aside to clean the tube up later.  But later she was back grooming herself looking pretty darned healthy.  I put her in the freezer again, this time for 2 hours.  Same thing happened!  Not wanting to do her in with any other method, I simply put her back with the others.  She has since produced another large brood of eggs, much to my dismay.  I wonder what will happen next?  I may have a serial killer living in my house.

Turns out that ants that live in colder climates produce glycerol that acts as an anti-freeze and makes it possible for them to survive the harsh winters of the Canadian climate.  My queen, one brick short of a load, apparently has it all together when it comes to the cold.

Parasitic fly

Ants Canada produced a video about Strongygaster globula, an endoparasite of Lasius neoniger, Lasius niger, and Lasius alienus. The video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLpz-B9T4F8&nohtml5=False

I seem to have one of these guys as well.  I have a few Lasius alienus queens for sure, so this queen is probably another of them.  She overwintered and didn't produce any eggs, long after her sisters had begun to produce.  Then one day, suddenly, there was a thing that looked kind of like a pupae, but about 3 times larger than the ones produced by the other queens.  My wife suggested maybe she had produced a drone, and that made sense, as apparently unfertilized queens sometimes do this.  But then I remembered having seen that video a long time ago, so I looked it up again today, and sure enough, that is what the thing growing with my queen looks like, and her gaster does seem a bit shriveled.  Poor girl, she is busy tending to it like it's one of her babies.  I have only been observing my ants under red light, and under that light the parasite looks the same color as the pupae, but not that I have taken the test tube out into the light, it looks much more orange than normal ant pupae.  Can't wait to see the fly emerge.

One almost disaster gives me the knowledge to fix a real disaster

A while back I tried to get a queen to move her brood out of a moldy test tube.  I tried light and it did nothing.  I applied heat, but didn't watch closely enough.  The heat created condensation, and when I came back, it appeared that the queen had drowned.  I felt horrible!  I put her on my table, to dispose of later.  When I came back a few hours later, she was busy cleaning her larvae, looking no worse for wear.  Lesson learned, be very careful with heat, and ants don't drown very easily.

Well last night I gave a little honey to a queen with two nantics that looked ready to eat.  I thought I gave them a reasonable amount, but clearly I was wrong!  The next day I found the two workers literally glued to themselves, antenna glued to their heads, their legs gummed up and stuck to their bodies.  Seriously bad mistake!  They had tracked honey everywhere.  The queen still looked fine, and three more pupae looked okay, but possibly a little stuck in some honey.  I felt horrible, especially seeing the two workers still alive, but clearly suffering.  A couple hours later the situation looked even more dire, with one worker not moving at all, and the other twitching, antennae still stuck firmly to it's head.  What to do?  When I am sticky I take a bath.  My previous experience with the queen I thought I had drowned combined with some reading that told me that while ants will drown, they can actually close their spiracles for a time to prevent water entering allowing them to survive submerged for a awhile.  I felt that I didn't have much to lose.  I took a syringe and carefully flooded the test tube with water, and then drained it out again.  The queen struggled for a bit, and then everybody just looked dead.  An hour later, everybody looked completely fine!  They are very busy grooming themselves and each other, and they look no worse for wear, antennas wriggling happily in the air.  I don't know about the state of the pupae, won't know that for awhile probably.  There might also be some residual damage to the queen and the two workers, but so far so good.

Lots of lessons learned!  Be careful with the honey, you can always add more, but it is much harder to take away if you add too much.