The Ants have moved in!
As I mentioned previously, we acquired a modern-day ant farm for the office a week or so ago, but we were lacking the ants to populate it. After ordering them from the product website, they came through my letter box last weekend in what can only be described as a see-through 35mm film canister. I’m not sure how long them had been in there, but the 30 or so ants seemed to have made themselves at home and had tunnelled routes in and around the soil in this very small container.
Now the hard part was to transfer the ants (minus soil) into the Antquarium. We decided to tip the contents of the container into a larger beaker and catch the ants and put them into their new habitat. This seemed easier than first though, as trying to manage 30 or so ants was no easy task! When we managed to get about half-a-dozen in the Antiquarim things started to get tricky, as the ones already ‘inside’ kept trying to get out.. There were moments when the whole process felt like a Carry-On movie with me tying to put the new ants in, and my colleague trying to catch the escapees! I think we only had one casualty, and one more that did manage to break-free!
After the initial few hours in their new home, not much happened, apart from them all huddling together in one corner (see 1st picture). That was all to change by the next morning when I came into work, so see that tunnelling had started in earnest.
The Antquarium has been of great interest here at work, with people stopping by every-so-often to find out what has happened since they last looked.
So far so good..
The ants on Day 1 huddled in the top right corner
Tunnelling has started.
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