Oh, man!
Watch this.
A dead queen ant, green and gorgeous.
Sadly, she was one of the many unlucky ones.
And just next to her, three royal queens huddled in their silken nest protecting their new
set of brood.
We’ll get to meet these three royal weaver ant sisters in a bit.
But first, let’s remove this dead body.
Now you guys will love my plans for this new weaver ant queen trio, and I am elated to
finally bring back weaver ants, once again, to the channel.
Stay tuned because you guys will all be involved in their fate, as well.
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Weaver Ants, arguably one of the most unique and highly coveted ant species in the world,
and of course, highly desired by ant keepers like myself.
They form their iconic leaf-basket nests within trees and shrubs, with leaves all bound together
using silk produced by their larvae.
Now, as some of you may know, I’ve had a massive colony of weaver ants in the past
on this channel, if you recall the great Emerald Empire, but had to set them free back into
the wild, during the pandemic, when I was forced to downsize.
But now that the pandemic is over and we’ve finally moved into our AC Ant House, I’ve
been trying to work at bringing these web-spinning ants back to the channel.
Last year, I came close, raising a solo weaver ant queen in a plastic bottle to her first
set of nanitics, but strangely after going away for a few days out of town, I was surprised
to return to the queen completely and mysteriously gone from the bottle.
I suspected it was a colony of pharaoh ants that broke into their setup and killed them
all, leaving not a single trace of exoskeleton behind.
But, I’m back again this year, trying once more, but this time is extra special.
Having this sorority of weaver ant queens that have come together and chosen to cooperatively
raise their colony, a process known as pleometrosis, will be amazing to document for scientific
purposes, because based on my previous discussions with my myrmecologist friend Dr. David General,
little is known about how weaver ant colonies start.
I obtained the old Emerald Empire by taking an already established weaver ant nest and
placing it into a terrarium, so I couldn’t film nor observe their origin story.
What we do know is that weaver ants are polygynous, which means, weaver ant colonies can contain
more than one queen ant.
We know that queen weaver ants come together after mating in their nuptial flight and found
colonies pleometrotically, as you can see in this video sent to me from my farmer friend
Angie Mead King of a tonne of weaver ant queens all huddled together on one of her citrus
plants.
Go check out her farmer videos by the way!
They're awesome!
But other than that, we don’t actually know how the colonies start up in the wild, what
their success rate is, if more queen ants means greater chance of success in the wild,
etc.
So this weaver ant queen sorority will be of great interest to ant science.
Now you guys will love what future setup I have planned for them, which I’ll get to
in a sec, but first, let’s meet our beautiful queens shall we?
Within this silken web chamber, spun using silk produced by the eldest larvae, three
queen weaver ants huddle together.
There’s a yellow queen, guarding the entrance, a brown queen, and a green queen.
Pretty cool how the queens of this species come in varying shades and colours like this.
I placed the four weaver ant queens together in this large container and the three of these
queens huddled together in the corner and began laying eggs together.
The fourth queen who died, never laid eggs, which probably meant she wasn’t fertilized.
But it’s been three weeks now, and their collective brood has gotten bigger and bigger.
I’m pretty sure all three of these queens have been successfully fertilized and are
all contributing to the egg batch.
It’s pretty amazing what these queens have to go through in the wild before their first
set of mature larvae arrive to allow them to spin a protective silk chamber like this,
because for the first couple of weeks before then, the weaver ants must brave harsh weather
conditions, as it’s now rainy season at the time of this founding stage, plus they
need to aggressively ward of enemies and predators, including other ants.
I suspect banding together like this, increases their chance of success in the wild, simply
because the more queens you have to protect the brood, the better, and the more eggs you
can amass in a shorter time period, the more initial workers you have to pioneer the starting
colony.
So, AC Family, time for your help!
What should we name these three gorgeous weaver ant queens?
Let me know your name suggestions in the comments and I will choose my top 5 favourites for
all of us to vote on in a future video.
Alright, AC Family, and now time to share with you guys my plans for their epic future
housing.
So this trio is currently being housed in a long container.
For humidity, I have a moistened cotton ball.
This setup is enough for them right now.
Eventually, we can move them into an actual plant.
But, as much as possible, I’d like to house this starting weaver ant colony in this container
so we can film them for as long as possible as the colony grows.
Now as for their epic setup, AC Family, listen to this!
So, have any of you ever seen those indoor beehive setups where the beehive is encased
in glass and we could have full view of the bee colony from indoors, but a tube connects
the colony with the outdoors so the bees could leave and collect their nectar and pollen
as they normally would outside?
Well, what I hope to do with this colony is to attempt something similar.
I would like to keep raising them in this container, which at one end has a hole currently
blocked by cotton, but this hole can act as an exit to an open window space of my ant
room.
I’ll just block the rest of the space off with glass or mesh.
But once the worker ants of the colony do arrive, they can wander out on their own out
of this hole, and collect their own food outside, as they would in the wild.
The ants could climb down to ground level from the Ant Room and forage for food as they
normally would.
I’m not concerned that they might be too high, because I see weaver ant nests as high
up as the roof deck a whole story up on the third floor of the AC Ant House.
Anyway, the reason I love this idea is because first, of course, less maintenance because
I wouldn’t need to feed the colony anymore as they’d be collecting the necessary insects
they need from the wild, which by the way would be much more nutrient dense than any
feeder insect I could offer, plus the weaver ants would be able to collect food types that
I couldn’t possibly provide like honeydew from plant insects.
In fact, I could probably even help them out by fixating a black light on a timer that
turns on at night, so I could attract their insect prey right at their doorstep, to further
increase their chances of catching the food they need.
This would not be very hard to do and also awesome to film from below the ants as they
hunt for insects against the window!
Plus, once the colony gets to a size where they need to move into a plant, I can easily
remove this lid and attach this entire container to a large terrarium with a plant growing
inside it.
I say terrarium and not simply a plant on an island with an ant barrier, because I don’t
want mosquitos and other outside insects coming into my ant room through the hole.
Plants seem to really do well in my Ant Room so I won’t need any grow lights, unlike
in the previous Emerald Empire setup.
Now there is a chance the ants might just simply decide to move their entire colony
into a tree nearby and totally desert us, but the ants will be at the perfect temperature
in my Ant Room, they’ll be free of disturbance and competing weaver ant nests, and free of
torrential winds and rain, so my hopes is they’ll choose to stay put.
We could film everything and not need to maintain anything, except for watering the plant the
ants live on, of course.
So what do you guys think?
If we could pull this off, I think it would be one of the craziest and more epic ant setups
we’ve ever done on the channel.
Let me know your thoughts.
I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on the progress of this weaver ant sorority.
The first set of workers should be arriving any day now, and when they do, you can rest
assured I’l be there to film everything, and attach this container to the window, and
thereby all of us, AC Family, could take part in ant scientific history and exciting ant
research.
So, if you haven’t yet, do hit the SUBSCRIBE button to be part of this continuing ant story,
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Thank you all so much for watching and supporting the ants.
It’s ant love forever!
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