A new blog today for you.  You may have noticed that it has been a few days since I last posted.  Apart from the fact that Im quite a busy person, its also silly to post blogs just for the sake of it, so I post blogs when there is cool stuff to talk about.

Well, the Tetramorium Caespitum (Pavement Ants) have arrived from Antstore today, another swift delivery, although I did have to wait for them to come into stock.  They are quite a small ant, and very similar to Messor Barbarus looks wise.  The Queen is just a bit bigger than a Lasius Niger queen, and the same sort of body shape and colour (shiny) as a Messor.  The package arrived safe and sound and very well packed as usual.  The TC's were in a test tube, with the usual bung at the end.  I was slightly surprised when I got them as there were 5 workers and the queen, and from what I could see, NO eggs at all.  They were quite hungry as well.  As luck would have it, I was eating a bread roll, so broke off a few crumbs, and put them into the test tube with the ants, they were snaffled up very quickly.  I also ordered some sand and gravel for the ant farm that I had left over after moving the messor barbarus into the home made plaster nest.

I sorted out the ant farm with the sand etc, and then put the TC's directly into it after creating a small starter hole for them (used some tweazers to create a hole in a place I wanted them to be...central).   They are very active at the moment, moving sand around etc.  I will leave them for a while to settle in.

My Messor Barbarus seem to be doing very much better than they were before now that they are in the plaster nest.  I have gone from the disaster of the first death of all my ants, and the loss of one...somewhere, to having 3 new callows.  For those that don't know, a callow ant is a newborn...its smaller, and paler than all the others.  I have also noticed that 2 of the workers that I may have thought were media size workers have grown, and if they continue to do say, may become Major workers.  I'll keep you posted on that.

My Myrmica Ruginodis are just doing fantastically.  I havn't seen much in the way of excavations lately, I think they have probably done all they need to do at the moment.  There are stacks of eggs though.  Eggs would number 20 or 30, larvae would number the same again, and pupae would number the same again.  This is excellent, and a real testiment to why I got this species in the first place.  They are proactive, lively, and a joy to watch...all the crickets I've been feeding them no doubt, and I would say they are going through 1 a day.

Both of my Lasius Niger queens are still burried alive in their chambers, and both are doing well with their eggs.  In fact, I am just starting to see the eggs taking the shape of larvae "J shaped".

Now, a quick wondering...today, I rescued 3 winged queen ants from the paddling pool in the garden...they were not there yesterday, so i'm wondering if there was another nuptial flight today.  I didn't personally see any flying ants in the air at all.  Perhaps it was the Lasius Flavus turn...let me know your thoughts. TTFN