Leaf Cutting Ant Forum

wow.. amazing What will become of them?

Cheers Richard and I think the ants came from you Sean

The foraging tank is struggling to maintain 20c and the ants are quite sluggish, so not at full working strength. There's one Queen in there too as that's now where the dump seems to be as well. She seems to be helping but looks quite aimless with whatever she's doing. She also gets carried around by the workers where she goes limp like a kitten being carried by it's mother. I suppose she is slowly starving to death. The others have remained in with the fungi.

A weekend of much needed maintenance for my girls after noticing one of the fungi in one pod was sitting in few mills of water. Condensations has been a lot higher then normal so i began with dismantling the dump. It was completely full and totally soaked which is probably the cause of the high condensation. I Took off the dump chamber and replaced it with a gauze vent and moved it to the feeding area which is where the ants were taking the rubbish too anyway. Sadly my wife came home in the middle of emptying the dump and thought i had been ill probably due to her cooking because of the dreadful smell upstairs.....

So ill have to wait a while now to see if the vent cures the water. First pic shows where the new vent is where the old dump was.



Gaze fitted in recess inside elbow



Water level above plaster



Foraging area and dump. Need to move dump outside of tank, but ants have taken most of the waste from the feeding area to the dump.

Stunning colony and great set up! I'd love to use your pictures on our facebook page, can you post them there so people can ask questions?

Thanks Sean 'fraid i'm not a face palm fan but your welcome to right click and save and use them if they will help...

I had the same issue with pooling water Andy, I was soaking it up with rolled up kitchen roll ha ha.
Do you get condensation on the lids of the pods and what type of thermostat do you use? Just curious buddy.

I don't plan on opening the lid for obvious reasons to do any mopping lol, but i'm pretty sure that the lack of ventilation combined with a really wet dump which was, as is all the pods being heated from the bottom has certainly added to the moisture. The lids have big drops of water on them but to be honest since i moved the dump and added a vent, it's already got a lot better in just a few days, and by the weekend the water level should have gone by itself.

I have used a Habistat pulse thermostat from the start. When the ambient temps fluctuate, so does the incubator temps by a couple of degrees. So always fiddling with it. But the probe is pretty much buried in the fungus so not to sure on the correct temps.

Got you, where is your probe for the pulse stat, is that in a pod or where you talking bout a thermometer probe? Cheers for the info Andy

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Ah no, sorry my mistake. The stat probe is in the incubator and the thermo and hydro probes in the pod.

Andyj wrote:Thanks Sean 'fraid i'm not a face palm fan but your welcome to right click and save and use them if they will help...

Thanks, much appreciated!