Guys, check this out.
Dead queen ants littered the floor.
What a bloody mess.
Let’s clean this up.
I went into the AC Test Tube portal and with my tweezers carefully lifted out the dead
queen bodies.
Rest in peace, royal ladies.
I’m sorry you won’t be able to become founders of colonies of your own.
Guess that’s just how ant life is.
Here, another dead queen in this test tube.
Let’s remove her from the setup, as well.
Placing an AC plug into the hole.
Now, as I looked into this other test tube next door, here I spotted two living queen
ants.
They huddled up against the cotton.
These are two queen yellow crazy ants.
Stunning queens, this species!
One of them had broken off her wings, which is typically what queen ants do after their
nuptial flight (let’s call her Queen Bridgette), and another still had her wings.
Let’s name her Queen Amy.
Now little did I know, there would be something about this situation that made me quite sad.
Truth is, Queen Amy had been huddled here in this test tube for days now since she moved
in.
I wondered what these two queens were communicating to each other.
“Why not come to join us on the other side?
The girls will be nice to you this time.
I promise, you’ll see,” Queen Bridgette recommended.
After no response from Queen Amy, Queen Bridgette broke off to head to the other side.
She was then met in the arena by another lighter queen, Queen Bella.
“So what did she say?”
Bella asked.
“She’s not coming.
I think she’s traumatized.”
Bridgette answered.
The two queens headed back to the main group.
“Alright, let’s not bring up that we discussed this.”
“Duh, of course not!
Hi!”
AC Family, behold the main queen sorority packed together, all raising their babies,
in what has become the test tube of power.
This week, I learned that when you place a bunch of queen ants together, some real high
school dynamics can happen.
You guys will be shocked at what I learned happens when you place a group of hormonal
queen yellow crazy ants, together in a single place.
Can ants form a Mean Girls Club?
Find out about the intriguing world of multi-queen ant dynamics scientists call pleometrosis,
here on the AntsCanada Ant Channel.
Please SUBSCRIBE to the channel, and hit the BELL ICON!
Welcome to the AC Family!
Enjoy!
I’m not sure about you, guys, but high school for me was a bit of a nightmare set of 5 yrs.
Bullying was everywhere, and I was one of those scrawny nerdy guys that got stuffed
into his own locker at one point by a school bully.
Every day after school, I just couldn’t wait to get home, so I could head to my room
and play with my various exotic pets, and that helped me forget it all.
It’s why when I witnessed the strange behaviour in my multi-queen setup this week, it brought
me back to some really strange times in my teenagehood, that I had thought I had long
forgotten, and placed far away into the recesses of my memory vault.
But, I have a very important question to ask you, after I’ve shared with you, everything
I saw with my new yellow crazy ants queen sorority so do stay tuned for that coming
up.
Now before I show you how my queen ants started establishing a “Mean Girls Group”, I have
to quickly explain why I formed a sorority of queen ants here in the first place.
So where I live in the tropics, rainy season officially began about two weeks ago.
It rains every day now for a few hours, sometimes several times a day, but it’s at this wet
time that plants and animals truly flourish!
Trees and plants enter full bloom due to the insane abundance of water, coming out of their
summer hibernation period when it never really rains much and gets extremely hot for most
plants and animals to thrive!
With abundant plant life all around, temperatures comfortable, humidity high, and soils soft
and moist, it also happens to be prime environmental conditions for insects to start breeding.
Over the past three weeks, at the onset of rainy season, the eusocial insects have been
literally forming thick swarms around all the lights on my property, non-stop every
night.
If you had a glass of water in your hand outside at night, the insects would be falling in
and getting stuck in the water.
Species after species of termites and ants, each had their allocated night, on which to
form their nuptial flights, where they would breed, to initiate the start of the next generation.
The local bats of my area literally rejoice at this time, and so too do we ant keepers!
I managed to catch an abundance of queen ants this year, including our Meranoplus bicolor
queen and her starting brood, as you’ve seen in our video a couple weeks back, a species
of Crematogaster that might even be a brand new undiscovered species, and these, our sorority
of yellow crazy ant queens.
Now this sorority was special because I’ve had yellow crazy ants in the past on this
channel, as you recall the OG colony we called The Golden Empire which was an epic colony
to own, but if you recall, that colony was already a small established colony when they
came to me.
I’ve never actually started a yellow crazy ant colony from scratch before, from just
pregnant queen ants.
And if you’re asking why did you put a bunch of queen ants together and not just put each
one in its own test tube setup?
Well, it’s because yellow crazy ants are known as polygynous, meaning their colonies
in the wild contain many queen ants.
Unlike fire ants, like the Crimson Knights you saw in last week’s video living on their
Volcanic island Volcania, who only have one queen per colony and will not tolerate more
than one queen, yellow crazy ants can have multiple queens in a single colony.
After mating, queens will group together and found a colony cooperatively, a process called
pleometrosis, which is why I simply placed a handful of queen ants into this AC Test
Tube Portal setup and watched to see what would happen.
And well, turns out the group of post-nuptial flight queen ants, that I call a sorority,
have already begun to lay their batch of eggs.
Have a look!
That is one huge brood pile!
It looks like there may even be some newly hatched larvae in there!
They’ve only been living here for one week, and I loved watching the queens lovingly care
for the brood, licking the eggs clean and even grooming and cleaning each other.
This was pretty cool to see that these queens were all getting along, except for one queen.
Queen Amy was the only queen who I never saw join the group, ever.
I suspect, that she’s become an outcast from the group.
Now there’s no way to tell if this is what actually happened, but I did find it strange
that she continues to insist on not mixing with the group.
I wondered: Did the others cast her out?
Or did she just prefer to leave the group on her own accord for whatever reason.
What do you guys think?
In a strange way, I could see myself in Queen Amy, and if she was like me in high school,
I knew exactly how she felt.
You see, the reason I suspect that the group had casted her out is because in multi queen
colonies undergoing pleometrosis, depending on the species, there usually is a queen hierarchy,
where some more dominant alpha queens act aggressively towards beta queens, driving
them away to other parts of the nest especially when babies finally arrive.
This is a process ant scientists call oligogyny and is what I suspect happened here.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some or all of the dead queens we saw at the start
of the video were actually killed.
Pretty sad.
But, AC Family, there is a glimmer of hope to this story.
It seems there were two queen ants from the group of seven power queens that would pay
frequent visits to Queen Amy, the most frequent visitor of which was Queen Bridgette.
I’ve come to learn that she was Queen Amy’s best friend.
Another more light-coloured queen also would emerge from the main power test tube to check
up on her, and that was Queen Bella.
And as coincidentally strange as this is, again this all brought me back to my high
school days, as I remember also having just two best friends in school that made those
times a bit more bearable.
Their names were Lawrence and Byron, two Asian kids, both of whom I still talk to, and both
have actually had the chance to fly in from the other side of the world, to visit me here
at the Ant House.
It made me happy that Queen Amy at least had two such friends on her side.
I loved watching Queen Bridgette comforting Queen Amy, and even tugging at her leg at
times, to get her to join the group.
This was to no avail, though.
It seemed Queen Amy was adamant about not joining the power group, the Mean Girls group.
So, this is all I know about this starting polygynous yellow crazy ant colony so far.
I am excited to bring yellow crazy ants back to the channel, and even more excited to watch
this sorority found a supercolony of yellow crazy ants, with millions of workers, like
their predecessors in the old Antiverse, the OG Golden Empire.
But what I find the most exciting is I’m really intrigued and interested to see how
the social dynamics of this multi-queen yellow crazy ant colony actually play out over time,
as the colony grows.
I wonder if Queen Amy will ever get out of her rut and decide to join the other girls,
or if the Mean Girls power group continues to grow in hormonal tension, and undergoes
further oligogyny, i.e. driving other beta queens out of the main power test tube, like
Queen Bridgette and Queen Bella, perhaps.
Truth is, scientists still don’t know everything there is to know about the social dynamics
of queen ants in polygynous ant colonies, which is why having this new yellow crazy
ant sorority really intrigues me.
Watching and observing how they develop will be great to document for ant scientific research.
Now, at the start of the video, I mentioned I’d be asking you a very important question
and it’s this: What should we name our new sorority of yellow crazy ants?
Let me know your name suggestions in the comments and I will choose my top five favourites for
all of us to vote on in a future video.
Also, seeing as it’s anting season now in the Northern Hemisphere, feel free to visit
us at antscanada.com if you need ant keeping equipment, like this AC Test Tube Portal,
ant test tubes, or ant farms that you see me using in my videos, so you can get the
most out of your ant keeping experience.
We also list vendors of local ant colonies with a queen on the site if you need to source
an ant colony of your own.
Anyway, I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on the progress of these yellow crazy ants,
and let’s all hope that Queen Amy pulls through this seemingly difficult time.
So if you haven’t yet, do hit that subscribe button to follow this continuing ant story,
and hit the like button as it really helps a lot to let youtube know you enjoy these
ant videos and that they’re worth sharing to new audiences.
And finally AC Family, I’d like to close with some ant inspired wisdom.
With it being the end of the school year for many of you, and a new year coming up a few
months later, I hope all of you who can relate to Queen Amy, remember to always keep strong.
I can tell you from having experienced it myself, the bullying doesn’t last forever.
Don’t ever be afraid to ask elders or a counsellor for help, and always keep your
friends who support you close.
Most of all, continue to pursue the fun things in life that fill you with passion.
Be kind to everyone, and never forget those who helped you along the way, because karma
is real.
So to anyone who may be going through hell now, just remember your future stronger self
is out there, recalling how you manifested the paradise you've earned, by persevering
through your tough times.
Because I’ve learned that in life, sometimes you need the rain, to truly flourish and bloom.
Thank you all for watching and supporting the ants.
It’s ant love forever!
Hope you can SUBSCRIBE to the channel as we upload every Saturday at 8AM EST.
Please remember to LIKE, COMMENT, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed this video, to help
us keep making more.
It's ant love forever!