Leaf Cutting Ant Forum

The Last Picture is an approach the nest box . The system of tightness and sealing was not as good, the rubber has gone wearing and the locking mechanism is seen to be not of good quality so every time I open and close have to look very carefully to verify that there be no open gap . Within this container a few weeks ago began to make a second culture of the fungus . At first it was a bit too tiny but now is about 50 mL. I had read that this species did two gardens but had one Honguera but is that in this case it was not. I'll have to think about how I enable them a new place foraging to leave this place as a crop because they need just that to grow and so far I'm throwing new leaves almost next to this new fungus , so I do not think they like my performance a lot.

The approximate volumes of the enclosures are:
Red bowl : 270 mL .
Boy with mushroom container 30 mL.
Waste area : 80 mL.
Nest box , now with mushroom cultivation : 900 mL.
Well that is a summary of the eight colonies. Since the fall began here so hopefully at some point be aletarguen a little and stop collecting to hibernate , but so far none of this has happened. When I have more news I return to put another entry in the diary. If they like comments here .
[ Edito volumes to add all containers to have an idea of ​​sizes. Perhaps it cheated when making an anthill for cutting leaves. ]

This post has already a long time without update or conclusion.
Unfortunately colonies remained active at the time of the previous entry died all in a span of two or three weeks around August last year. I did not get to spend the winter. The neglected few days and were dying, the fungus was drying and even though I tried I could not get it to do so again thrive. Not if they were sick or if you just were dried for lack of any vitamin or something that lacked them.
It was a sad time and did not give me want to publish, was about to spring and was hoping to make new screenshots and start again, but even that failed me. I captured about eight queens, put them in their containers and fed with leaves. Some already had some fungus when one day I went to my mother's house and I saw he had a bunch of very nice roses that gave my father, I took some petals and wash a bit, the trocé and the day the queens . After three days all died. I am convinced that the rose was treated with insecticide and that had washed over the intoxiqué petals.
Time passed, I had a lot of work and many changes in my life and walked away a little of the forum. Now came another spring in the southern hemisphere and I'm back wanting to start over. I caught a lot of Acromyrmex queens few days ago and have all their seeing if you are successful in producing fungus containers. If I can do so start another daily, from scratch, to tell this new breed of ants.
With this message I close this newspaper, I think that despite everything was a good experience and I hope that those who have followed him as I enjoyed doing it. I learned a lot in this process and I suppose others have learned things with me. Yet I understand that all this time without tickets and the unfinished history of these ants may be disappointed or disillusioned readers. To all my apologies, you go through different moods to do this and when things go wrong do not make you want to continue.
Thanks to all who followed him, read and commented. I will try not to disappoint next time.
Best regards.

From Marco:
Hi guys, sorry for any spelling errors. I translated it with a software to the best of my ability and added as many pics and info as possible.

Original post found here:
http://www.lamarabunta.org/viewtopic.ph ... 6&p=216600


Thanks

Just realised I've only copied 1 page of the post! But it's the most important part anyway. The colonies were all started from single queens. Some fertile, some not. You can follo3 the whole journal with the link I posted

Good effort formica!

deansie26 wrote:Good effort formica!

Thanks

I think the colony 23 that crashed was a classic case of one of the phenomena illustrated in the Smell Test. If you look at the container housing the fungus in that picture you can see there is a patch of what looks like waste from the fungus. Also I think the fungus itself is sitting on bare plastic with a ball of something, maybe a damp tissue ball perhaps. This is a classic mistake. Firstly the ants cannot engineer their nest chamber, they have no substrate to work with. Also at this size there is no way they are carrying enough leaf material to maintain humidity. Hence the problems at the end when all of them died. I have found that with this type of management things go well when you are on top of the task all the time but it is unforgiving if you become lax which appears to be what happened here. Acromyrmex lundi are very common in Argentina, seem to be easy to get for this person. So the smell test would have revealed that the fungus in colony 23 died because of the ammonia build up in the nest chamber because the waste and the material the fungus was sitting on became soiled and smelly. I would smell each colony every day for the tell tale signs.