Kick Starting a Colony thats not cutting Leaves

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Acromyrmexbob
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Kick Starting a Colony thats not cutting Leaves

Post by Acromyrmexbob » Thu Dec 03, 2015 8:52 pm

So you have a colony of Leaf Cutters just arrived and they are not cutting leaves. No matter what you do, they will not take anything you have offered them. Acromyrmex are more known for this behaviour than Atta. After around a week the fungus is a woolly white colour and the ants are refusing to forage. This situation happens many many times with newly imported colonies. My way of dealing with them changes depending on how many colonies I have and what condition they are in after travelling.
Firstly, if possible, I add a little fungus and maybe some brood from a healthy, feeding colony. If this fungus is dark green then the recipient colony is likely to immediately start feeding and the fungus goes away well. Sometimes this does not work. In these cases I move to plan B. Here I take a favourite food of the other colonies, normally privet leaves or something similar. I cut tiny tiny pieces of these leaves and allow them to fall onto the fungus. When I say tiny, I mean the smallest you can cut. They should be no more than 2-3mm long. Allow these to fall onto the fungus and add enough that at least a quarter of the fungus garden is covered. The ants will start to move these leaves around. If they pick them up to move them they are likely to start working on them. I find that, if this does not work then the problem is intractable and difficult to solve. It may be the fungus is dead. Again, transplant. Final option, bring in some foraging size ants, one or two at a time and repeat the leaf scatter on the fungus when there are 6 or so new ants, after around 24 hours. These are some of the techniques I use to resurrect a dying colony.

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Acromyrmexbob
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Re: Kick Starting a Colony thats not cutting Leaves

Post by Acromyrmexbob » Thu Dec 03, 2015 8:53 pm

Plan C, to add to Plans A and B above, is more radical. I have noticed that when colonies are in distress (Acromyrmex) they tend to move home. They have developed a strategy of changing their environment and their location to fix any difficulties the colony may be having. But what is interesting about this behaviour is that once they have move they become very active. So plan C focusses on that trait. What I do is basically take the fungus and the workers and scatter them in the feeding area, leaving only a small amount of workers in the nest area. Even the queen can be chucked out of the nest. After a very short time the ants will start to carry everything back to the nest. Only this time they move into this high activity mode and it seems an almost inevitable consequence of the moving behaviour that they will follow this with rebuilding behaviour. And this rebuilding behaviour is always accompanied by cutting leaves and adding to fungus. So in order to kick start the colony you first of all have to kick start the ants into activity.

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