Hey, what’s going on here?
Wow!
Tonnes of fire ants above ground?
They’re everywhere!
Something’s happening, guys and I’m not quite sure what it is….
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Could the fire ants be planning an escape?
Could the ants be swarming because of food?
At first I couldn’t figure out what was causing these rave parties that my pet fire
ants, the Phoenix Empire here, were throwing every now and then within their setup, but
guys, after some careful investigation and snooping around, I finally found the answer
and it wasn’t what I was thinking!
Keep on watching until the end to discover the reason for these ant raves, and meanwhile
let’s see if you can figure it out before the answer is revealed!
Leave any guesses you might have in the comments, then come back to your guess to let us know
if you were correct!
No cheating!
Now, if you’re new, welcome to the City of Ashes, our ever-expanding ant farm setup
of the Phoenix Empire.
Now, when I first saw this raving, it reminded me of similar behaviour I saw in a past fire
ant colony I had, the Fire Nation, where at one moment the mothernest looked like this,
and another moment the nest looked like this!
They even held these massive floating raves on water!
It was an incredible sight, but at the time, it was a mystery to me as to why the ants
did this.
I just ended up calling them ant raves, as it looked like the ants were having a giant
scheduled party!
Of course, not to be confused with the huge festivities that take place when fire ants
have nuptial flights every year during breeding season, which is a totally different thing,
and surely our Phoenix Empire here was much too young a colony with no reproductive alates
yet to be holding nuptial flights this soon.
It had to be something else that was causing these raves, and I was determined to find
out!
Eventually these raves died down, but I suspected the cause of the partying was that the ants
were finally moving into our new Hybrid Nest Mini ant farm that we introduced to them a
couple weeks ago.
Could that be the reason they’re raving?
Peeking into the nest, I was surprised to see that the ants still hadn’t moved in
after two weeks.
They had moved in more dirt and even springtails had moved in, but overall the fire ants had
decided to simply treat this ant farm space like a highway leading into their hunting
grounds.
No worries.
Sometimes moving into new nests takes time.
But speaking of the hunting grounds, let’s look into Hell’s Kitchen, shall we?
Wow!
Have they remodelled the landscape or what?!
The place was completely devoid now of basil plants as they’ve dug them all up from the
roots, leaving them no chance of survival.
The hunting grounds were also now littered with dead cockroaches.
And oh my, AC Family!
Look at that!
That is one massive supermajor!
The colony is so big now the degree of specialization and formation of castes is much more pronounced.
Supermajors like these are born with huge heads which are packed with muscle and help
the colony with defense, or as seen here, with tearing into hard to rip materials, like
this roach exoskeleton.
Imagine having jaws of life attached to your face!
The colony now has hundreds of these supermajors, and it’s so amazing to see the size difference
compared to the other workers!
Now some of you may have guessed the fire ant raves were being caused by food.
I mean, isn’t food a great reason for a colony to come swarming?
Well, yes but it wasn’t food, because the raves would happen even when I didn’t give
food, plus if you look back on some of the rave footage, some of the ant ravers aren’t
exactly paying attention to the food.
It had to be something else.
And, I eventually discovered what that something else was, by pure accident, as I was trying
to figure out something completely different that was also puzzling me, and that’s this:
the colony was eating a lot, we now had tonnes of huge supermajors, plus I noticed that the
colony was drinking so much water and sugar water now, and all these were sure signs that
the Phoenix Empire was a huge ant colony!
But the fact that they hadn’t yet expanded into our new Hybrid Nest, made me wonder where
were they expanding to?
Surely, they weren’t all crammed into the Fire Fortress were they?
If so, this ac Ant Tower of theirs must be packed with babies at this point!
I removed the red film to look inside.
Wow!
So many brood rooms!
Have a look!
Our Phoenix Empire’s nest is so beautiful!
OK, but though there were a lot of brood here, it still seemed that for a colony as big as
our Phoenix Empire, the ants were still stashing the majority of the brood away somewhere else!
A colony this size has so much more brood than we see here in their Fire Fortress!
So where was the majority of the colony hiding now?
Little did I know, the answer to that lead me to ultimately discover the reason my fire
ants were randomly raving!
Looking back at the highway in the Hybrid Nest, I noticed that some ants were bringing
brood into Hell’s Kitchen!
We did see in a past video that the ants were treating this wood hollow in Hell’s Kitchen
as a satellite nest.
Could the majority of the colony be living in this wood?
It’s not very much space, I thought to myself.
But then I noticed a sort of mound below the wood, and it made me wonder if our Phoenix
Empire was somewhere down there hiding all their brood away from our view.
What do you guys think?
It looks like there’s quite a bit of activity going on here right?
Well, there’s only one way to find out if there’s a nest here!
I took some water and poured just a little over the mound, not enough to drown the ants,
which is practically impossibly by the way, but if the ants were just living in the wood,
this would not be enough to incite a response in the fire ants, however if the ants did
have tunnels and chambers full of brood down there, we’d see a mass response from the
ants.
I sat and watched to see if we’d see anything.
At the surface the ants seemed to very slowly escalate into a hi-jinx, and sure enough the
mood escalated into a full-out mobilization response!
I looked to the ant highway in the Hybrid Nest and saw that some of the workers were
carrying brood towards the Fire Fortress.
Many ants were also rushing in from the Fire Fortress to help at Hell’s Kitchen.
In Hell’s Kitchen, I saw ants were moving brood in and out of the wood hollow, which
to me meant that yes, there must have truly been some underground brood chambers below
the wood and the ants were rushing to relocate the brood in response to that little bit of
water.
I also noticed ants were moving brood to and from the neighbouring wood, which meant they
probably had a satellite nest there, too!
How interesting!
And as I followed the excited trail of ants back to the Fire Fortress, where I assumed
most of the brood was being relocated, that’s when I saw it!
Ah-ha!
Ant rave back at home!
So AC Family, that’s when the answer came to me.
These ant raves were not parties at all!
They were part of a rain response, and looking back at every time these fire ant raves happened,
they didn’t just randomly happen.
I realized, they happened whenever it rained, and in the Phoenix Empire’s case, whenever
I randomly decided to moisten the hunting grounds.
Let me explain!
Fire ants, like all ants, have a rain response where at the first sign of rain the ants quickly
mobilize to bring the young to a higher, drier, deeper, or flood-free area.
Perhaps, due to the fact that the ants have completely cloaked the tubes with gravel,
I didn’t notice the transportation of brood during these mysterious raves, but yes, thinking
back, the fire ant raves happened every time I watered Hell’s Kitchen.
Why they come boiling up to the surface though, is still beyond me, but perhaps it’s so
that the majority of the ants are outside of the nest in case they need to quickly form
a living raft in response to flooding, which is totally a fire ant thing, if you’ve ever
seen one, and a vital survival technique in the rain-prone areas of the world they’re
from.
And in case you were wondering why the ants didn’t seem to be in sync with where they
were relocating the brood, well, ants sometimes take a while to completely agree where the
best place to stash the brood actually is at critical times like this.
Eventually, though, they all get on the same page.
But at least we now had our answer!
One thing I noticed was that some of the ants at the wood hollow had transported batches
of eggs, which to me meant that the queen of the colony, the Ember Empress was hiding
out somewhere here in Hell’s Kitchen!
For now, it seems the fire ants prefer to occupy tunnels they’ve dug out themselves
in their Fire Fortress and in areas of Hell’s Kitchen, but eventually, our Phoenix Empire
will grow so big, Hell’s Kitchen and the Fire Fortress will no longer be enough space
for them, and they’ll finally move some of the colony into the Hybrid Nest.
I personally can’t wait to see it completely packed with fire ants, and crossing fingers,
hopefully see the queen again!
Once, again, I appreciate you all watching and solving this ant rave mystery with me.
Did you guess correctly?
I will surely continue to update you guys on our Phoenix Empire’s winding and exciting
journey of growth and evolution into the great colony they’re destined to become, but until
then, thank you for watching and supporting the ants!
It’s ant love forever!
AC Family, did you enjoy today’s episode?
Next week, I have a cool invention that I think you guys will love that I plan on installing
into the Phoenix Empire’s setup!
All in next week’s video, so if you haven’t yet, do SMASH that SUBSCRIBE button and BELL
ICON now, and hit ALL so you get notified at every upload.
Also don’t forget to hit the LIKE button every single time including now.
It would really mean a lot to me, guys.
Thank you!
AC Inner Colony, I have left a hidden cookie for you here, if you would like to watch the
entire Phoenix Empire rain response all to the sounds of relaxing music and thunderstorm
ambiance.
It’s super relaxing and satisfying!
And guys, did you know that it’s anting season in the Northern Hemisphere, and you
don’t even need to leave your home to start an ant colony?!
You can catch pregnant queen ants from the safety of your own backyard, balcony, or open
window starting this month!
Be sure to visit AntsCanada.com for all your ant keeping and collecting gear shipped to
you in a special package from our ant-loving facility in the USA, so you can get the most
out of your ant keeping experience.
We ship worldwide and also offer full email support if you need our help!
Visit AntsCanada.com today.
And now it’s time for the AC Question of the Week.
Last week, we asked:
Name one condition that needs to be met in order to decrease the chances of
cannibalism in our spiders.
Congratulations to Anthony Watson who answered:
The spiderlings needed to be well-fed!
Congratulations Anothony, you just won a free Ultimate Ant Keeping handbook from our shop!
In this week’s AC Question of the Week we ask:
What are supermajors for?
Leave your answer in the comments section and you could also win a free ebook handbook
from our shop!
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It’s ant love forever!