Welcome to the AC Ant Room, home to three very large ant colonies.
Each colony contains thousands and thousands of ants.
With all of these ants and brood within these nests, surely there are hungry mouths to feed,
and on today's menu, we have their favourite food item.
Cockroaches.
In this episode of the AntsCanada Ant Channel, we will watch each of our three ant colonies,
the Golden Empire, The Fire Nation, and the Dark Knights feeding on cockroaches, and even
check out some of the other snacks they enjoy!
Also in this video we will announce the winner of our grand annual Ant Love Contest 2017
and reveal the winner of a brand new All You Need Omni Gear Pack, a complete AntsCanada
ant setup!
Today will be full of ant discovery and fun, so be sure to keep watching until the end!
AC Family, sit back, relax, and let's watch our ants dine, in this thrilling episode of
the AntsCanada Ant Channel.
Please SUBSCRIBE to my channel, and hit the BELL icon!
Welcome to the AC Family.
Bon appetite!
Today I wanted to present tonight's ant feeding session in a more natural and real light,
so I figured for a change in this episode, we would observe the ants non-timelapsed and
with less editing, instead showing more intimate footage of the ants feeding so we can truly
admire what happens when ants get busy at processing their food.
First to be fed, is our Golden Empire, our yellow crazy ants.
It's been about two weeks since they've moved into this massive terrarium we call Hacienda
Del Dorado.
It was a way to help them get rid of their body mites.
It seems the ants now have the ability to dispose of their garbage appropriately, as
I see them creating rubbish piles in locations away from the nest.
Here are some discarded uneaten Fire Nation alate body parts and look, mites have found
these piles to feed on.
Unfortunately, I still see mites on the ants, but I do see some ants without mites, so we'll
have to wait, perhaps a month or two more, until the new generation of workers has completely
replaced the initial mite-infecected generation in order to truly determine if the move into
a massive terrarium helped.
You will see ants feasting here on some rotting mango as well as some raw honey.
They've been working on this for two days now and are definitely craving for their protein.
So here we go.
Dropping in a native Philippine cockroach!
AC Family, enjoy watching the Golden Empire feast!
More workers are coming now.
Word has reached the nest that food lays just a skip and a hop away.
It isn't long before the roach is surrounded by many hungry Golden Empire workers.
Some have completely abandoned the raw honey to come and help.
Yellow Crazy Ants lack stingers.
They instead spray formic acid, and they're using it to subdue and kill this huge roach
which as you can see is many times their size.
Other workers keep the cockroach pinned down.
Look at these workers trying to pull the cockroach by its antennae.
Haha!
Persistent little ones!
Now for those wondering, I feed all prey insects to my ants pre-killed which means they have
been crushed.
This also means that their body parts still move because insects don't have brains like
ours.
They have ganglia, a grouping of nerve cells which run down the center of their body.
This means then that even if you decapitate or crush a cockroach to kill it, it still
moves.
OK, let's let them continue to grapple with this huge carcass and move on to our most
aggressive and frightening ants, the Fire Nation, our red tropical fire ants!
As you know, we recently moved our fire ants into the Fire Palace, this deep rubbermaid
bin full of soil which they absolutley love!
It has become the colony's main nest!
Let's drop in a cockroach.
This one is a no brainer.
It gets swarmed by ants in a matter of seconds.
It isn't long before a thick carpet of ants covers this roach.
Let's add another shall we?
OK, and now time to head downstairs into the abyss to visit the new outworld on the Silver
Glacier of our Dark Knights, our Black Crazy Ants.
Let's drop in a roach for these hungry and deserving ants!
Let's reposition here so we can see a bit more.
In no time, the workers of the Dark Knights are all over this cockroach.
Watch them feed eagerly from the cockroach's wounds.
These black crazy ants waste no time.
Every night, I feed these three kingdoms different foods.
A varied diet is definitely the key to a healthy ant colony.
The Dark Knights usually get 1 or two roaches, as does the Golden Empire, and the Fire Nation,
being a lot larger than the other two ants colonies, they take 12 or sometimes I feed
them pieces of cooked meat, like this chicken leg which we offered as their house warming
gift, and yes, of course I filmed it, but this needed to be timelapsed because it took
2 days!
And gone!
Now, I don't know if you remember but a few months back I caught a trapjaw queen ant and
kept her in the dark and fed her hoping she would give us eggs, so we could start a colony
of trap jaw ants.
Well, I have an update, and you will be both shocked and super excited!
And all of that to come, in next week's video.
Thanks for watching!
And we'll see you next week, AC Family!
It's ant love forever!
Alright, AC Family!
Were you grossed out or was that cool?
Inner Colony members today's episode was a little taste of what you guys watch every
week in our hidden videos, but of course I still placed a hidden video for you here,
for extended footage of a cockroach being eaten by the Golden Empire.
And now it's time for the AC Question of the Week!
Last week we asked:
What is the name of the specialized workers in honeypot ants that store water?
Congratulations to Regnerum who correctly answered "Aquapletes".
Congratulations Regnerum you just won a free ebook handbook from our shop!
For this week's question of the week, we ask:
What is the name of the groupings of nerves controling movement in insects?
Leave your answer in the comments section and you could win a free Tshirt from our shop!
Alright, and speaking of free stuff, as you know, we love doing fun contest giveaways
to you guys our AC Family, and so last week we launched our annual "Ant Love Contest",
where we asked the question "What is Ant Love to You?" for a chance to win a FREE All You
Need Omni Gear Pack.
This year, we received over 1700 entries on our official Facebook page, and so as is our
problem every single year, it was SO hard for us to narrow it down to just 1 winner!
There were just so many great entries that made us smile, made us laugh, made us go WOW!,
made us go what da?, even some that made us tear up a little and warmed our ant-loving
hearts!
So, here we go after reviewing over 1700 entries, a big congratulations goes out to our ANT
LOVE CONTEST 2017 winner:
John Poster, who wrote a cool ant poem, which we have included in the info section of this
video.
Congratulations as well goes out to our runners up.
You guys each have won a FREE EBOOK Handbook from our shop!
Thank you all for playing this year, and for those that didn't win, don't worry as we are
always giving away free stuff from AntsCanada.com
Thanks for watching and we'll see you next week, AC Family!
Ant love forever!