For ant keepers, this is where the fun truly begins!
From catching the queen ants, freshly mated from their nuptial flights,
to placing them in test tube setups to allow them to raise their first set of workers,
known as nanitics, to finally reaching the point when the workers are just eager to break free from
their test tubes in the hopes of exploring the exciting world beyond, this Ladies and Gentlemen,
is where we as their keepers get to provide the ants, their very first legit ant farm.
Now last year, millions of you followed that exact journey of my fire ant queen,
named the Ember Empress, who gave rise to a budding fire ant colony,
who eventually moved into their first ant farm, that expanded, and expanded, and expanded,
until the massive fire ant kingdom that grew ultimately relocated to their permanent
home paludarium of majestic floating mountains, we called the Ember Islands.
But this year, the ants we’ve been watching grow are these huge carpenter ants,
and today the ants finally reach a great milestone in their lives, where we give them a home I think
would be perfect for the carpenter ants as their first ant farm:
this luxury Ant Tower of Wood. Will our ants like their new home? Only one way to find out!
Welcome to the AntsCanada ant channel.
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Guys, meet Colony 1.
This is the lucky carpenter ant colony we will all watch receive their brand new luxury home of wood.
But, guys, stay tuned until the end because I have a big surprise coming up
that I’m sure a lot of you will love. I’ll also be needing your help
and opinions later in the video so stay tuned for all of the ant goodness coming up.
Colony 1 is composed of 14 workers, lots of brood and one fat queen. Have a look at that gaster. You
can actually see through the stretched membrane at her insides which move under the surface.
Is that ant breathing? Ant digestion? Ant egg production? I could only guess.
The worker ants of Colony 1 are really cute. Have a look at these two ants feeding each other mouth
to mouth, a process called trophallaxis. It’s a cool way ants distribute food inside themselves
so food isn’t just sitting around in the nest which could cause a dangerous mold outbreak.
Each worker is full to the brim with food. They’ve been eating well!
Now this promising carpenter ant colony was the selected winner of a poll we held in last week’s
episode where you, the AC Family, the amazing subscribers of this channel (PS - if you haven’t
subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Do it now!), voted for them to receive a new home.
They won by 10,000 of your epic votes, and so I went ahead and prepared a new
and luxury ant farm for them, a type of home I’ve never before given to any ant
colony of mine in the past, so I was just as excited to connect this colony to it.
But before we go ahead and give them their new home,
some of you may be wondering, ok but what happened to the other ant colonies, the losers of the poll?
Well, they’re here.
Meet the other ant colonies!
The queens are all fattened. I’ve given the losing ant colonies miniature new homes. I’ve
simply attached AC Test Tube Portals from antscanada.com to their test tubes to act
as outworlds where the ants could feed from sweet jelly I placed inside the compartments.
I filmed the moment one of the colony’s workers discovered the food I placed in
for the first time. Check it out! The worker cautiously creeped outside its test tube
and into the AC Test Tube Portal… and Mmmmm! Jackpot!
Once full it ran back to the colony to tell the others to head outside and feast!
The colonies also have a fresh test tube of water waiting for them in case the colonies need to move
out, because these young ant colonies have already begun to accumulate garbage and establish bathroom
sites inside their test tubes. See all that gunk? I expect that in a few weeks, these test
tubes will be unlivable due to the mold that will start growing from their droppings and garbage,
and the colonies will have to pick up and move out into fresh new test tubes,
which will all be there waiting when that time comes. In the wild, the ants at this
stage would normally just bury this gross area when it gets real bad, and relocate.
But another advantage of having their new AC Test Tube Portals attached now, is that they can begin
piling their garbage and establishing bathroom sites outside of their nests, which some of the
ants have already instinctively begun to do, also what these ants would do in the wild.
Now, some of you may be wondering about Queen 5 whom we discovered didn’t actually get to mate
during her nuptial flight and was only producing dud male ants. Well,
for now I’m feeding her directly in her test tube and she’s caring for her male babies herself.
Some of you recommended I do this for the rest of her life,
but I’m not sure if that’s something I want to do for the next 30 yrs. I may just let her go.
Speaking of which, AC Family, here’s one topic I need your help with and opinions on regarding
these ants. Let me know your thoughts on this: Every colony you see here is now fat, healthy,
and on their way to becoming successful ant colonies. Now, I still haven’t decided what I’m
going to do with all of these extra ant colonies, because I don’t think I can keep them all, and
I was hoping they were a polygynous species that could all merge together to form one supercolony,
but as some of you may have seen in last week’s video, that experiment turned out to be
a nightmare! Speaking of which, Colony 8, by the way, has got lots of eggs and is well on the way
to recovery. But, guys, let me know what you think I should do with all these extra ant colonies.
If we decide to release them back into the wild, I’ll have to grow their numbers
first so they’d be strong enough to fend for themselves in the big bad wilderness.
OK, and now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Let’s go ahead and have a look
at the epic new ant farm we’re about to give our winning ant colony. Ooohhh this is so fun!
AC Family, behold! Within this box lays a piece of ant farm tech that
my team of experienced ant keepers and I designed with care, years of research,
and a tonne of ant love. Many of you at home from around the world, are already proud owners of
one of these luxury ant homes, and have your ant colonies living in them. In my opinion,
they’re a perfect beginner ant farm for new ant keepers,
and awesome first homes for an ant colony that is ready to move out of their founding test tubes.
This is the AC Ant Tower from antscanada.com. It contains two entrance ports. A hydration
basin at the bottom for drainage or hydration into the nest upwards, and a perforated lid for
easy access and ventilation, plus feeding chute for easy feeding. It’s wrapped in a red film
to make the ants feel like they are in the dark, as it is said that ants cannot see red light.
Now, here’s the thing, though. I’ve used this AC Ant Tower for my various ant colonies
in the past on this channel, but I’ve never used it to house carpenter ants,
which as you may know naturally live in wood,
not soil. So the area which I would normally fill with a digging medium like sand or soil, might
not work for our wood-tunneling carpenter ants which don’t typically dig nests in the ground.
And so, this week I had the craziest idea.
Wood! I fashioned a cylinder of wood that fits perfectly into the Ant Tower. Let’s go ahead
and place it inside. With this new layer of wood, my hopes were that our carpenter ants
would burrow into it, in the same way digging ants would dig into the layer of soil.
But one thing I wanted to show you was this.
A notch I bore into the wood to act as a starting hole for the carpenter ants.
Normally, I would simply create a starting tunnel in the soil
within the Ant Tower, but for our carpenter ants, I figured a starting burrow would do,
and I didn’t sand the edges so the ants could much easier start to pull at the fibers.
My hopes were that the ants would discover this starting notch and have the idea to begin digging
and creating tunnels up against the acrylic where we could see them. I had never tried
this before but have always wanted to, so I was excited to see how the ants would react to it!
What about you guys? Do you think the carpenter ants will burrow into this wooden area?
Alright, now before we go ahead and connect the colony, there was one last thing I needed to add
first. A house warming gift. Some sweet jelly. Alright, all was set. I placed on the lid, plugged
up one of the holes with an AC Plug that comes with the kit, and now to finally add the colony.
This was Colony 1 moments before being added to the Ant Tower.
The queen was not as fat at this point, and the colony was eagerly waiting for their next meal.
The workers were already pulling at the cotton which means the ants wanted out!
It was time to give this lucky carpenter ant colony the newest home of their dreams.
I attached this AC Test Tube adapter, which also comes with the kit,
into the entrance port, and all that was left was to attach the colony.
Ready AC Family? Let’s do this!
I attached Colony 1 to the test tube adapter.
Instantly, an ant wandered out of the test tube.
At first the ants were a bit shy, but once one of the ants touched the wooden surface it knew
exactly what to do. It entered the Ant Tower, and immediately found our sweet jelly offering.
Let me remove the red film for now so we can better see the action.
The ant feasted and began to fill up its social stomach with food. When it
was done it made its way back to the nest, wafting ‘I Found Food’ pheromones all around
to entice its fellow ants to come out and help with the food collection.
The ant excitedly rushed back home and immediately began to regurgitate its delicious food collection
to feed the queen. This ant knew its priorities!
Another worker also joined in on the trophallaxis, and once the queen was done, a third ant came to
feed from the scout. Wow! I’ve never seen threeway trophallaxis before! How awesome!
Having a taste of the sweet goods, caused the ants to want to venture out for themselves
to feast some more. More and more workers were on site now filling up their social
stomachs then returning to the nest to regurgitate the food to feed the other ants.
Again, lots of threeway trophallaxis! Now as this process of food collection continued,
I wondered when the ants would discover our hole and start digging. There were a
few times when I caught the ants checking out the starting burrow, which was a great sign.
The feeding process continued for the next two hours before I finally got sleepy and went to bed.
Over the next few days, I continued to feed the ants in the ant tower, but turns out, they never
showed signs of wanting to move or tunnel into the wood just yet. My thoughts were that the colony
was still too young and too few in worker force to want to move out of their founding test tube.
Regardless, this was still a very exciting experiment to conduct, because though I’ve
housed wood-boring carpenter ants in the past, I’ve always housed them in ant farms with pre-made
tunnels, never in ant farms which allowed the ants to burrow through wood, as they would in the wild.
I was curious to see at what stage the ants would decide to start expanding their nesting space,
and begin boring tunnels into the wood, in perfect carpenter ant fashion. I knew that eventually,
this ant colony would grow too big for this test tube, or that the test tube would foul up,
at which point the ants would surely need to move out, and I’m sure when that time comes,
the wood in the Ant Tower would start to look more and more attractive to the ants.
And now, AC Family, as mentioned at the start of this video, it’s time for a surprise.
In last week’s episode, aside from Colony 1 winning the vote, in a very close second place,
another one of our carpenter ant colonies also happened to acquire a great deal of votes.
A whopping close to 9,000 of you voted and felt that Colony 7 should receive the new ant farm.
Colony 7 was also a very worthy choice in my opinion, because like Colony 1, it was one of
the largest colonies of the bunch, and also as we suspected, a different species. The queen of
Colony 7 was a bit more reddish than the others, and even more unique: the colony produced naked
pupae, i.e. pupae that lacked cocoons. If you’re new to the world of ants, that is very strange for
the carpenter ant genus, because most carpenter ants produce cocoons during the pupal stage.
So keeping Colony 7 was a very attractive idea to me, due to the colony’s uniqueness
and success thus far, and apparently to almost 9,000 of you as well,
and so AC Family, I heard you out and gave Colony 7 an Ant Tower of wood, as well.
I was excited to see how this new story of our two rival kingdoms of carpenter ants,
living in their luxurious Twin Towers of Wood, as well as the remaining ant
colonies developing on the sidelines, would pan out over the next few weeks.
AC Family, I think it’s time we give our two carpenter ant colonies official names! Let me
know what you think we should name our two rival carpenter ant kingdoms in the comments, and let me
know which team you choose to be part of. I’ll have official flags designed for both colonies
and reveal them in the next episode. I’ll give you time to choose a team.
Overall, I couldn’t wait to see what was up next in the unfolding of this amazing ant story.
Thank you all for watching, and supporting the ants. It’s ant love forever.