Oh my goodness! Guys, I caught the ultimate queen ant. She’s big, she’s green, and she’s nestled
inside this plastic water bottle. I also intend on having her create the ultimate ant colony, and
amazingly enough, her royal highness has already laid eggs! Welcome to the AntsCanada Ant Channel!
Please SUBSCRIBE to the channel and hit the BELL ICON! Welcome to the AC Family! Enjoy!
I swear, guys when it rains, it pours! Literally, pours queen ants. So in addition
to the slender ant queen, the Crematogaster queen which may be a new species we discovered,
all our carpenter ants, our ultra rare, but cute Calyptomyrmex queen, and our Polyrachis queen ant,
this week I found this gorgeous big momma of a queen ant, who happens to be a true gem in the
world of ant keeping! She’s called an Asian weaver ant, no stranger to the channel if
you’re a long time AC Family, a subscriber to the channel, and as you already saw she’s laid eggs
and is on her way to founding an epic colony of weaver ants. We’ll get to meet her in this video
and talk about what we need to do next in order to get her to successfully found a thriving weaver
ant colony, but guys, keep on watching until the end because I actually saw something in her body,
yes, inside her actual body, that I managed to capture on film that I has left me perplexed.
Perhaps you guys can help me figure out what it is I see inside her body.
Anyway, let’s meet Her Royal Highness. Hello, gorgeous queen! We, the AC Family,
come in peace, and vow to care for you and your young from here on in.
Check out all those eggs! So when I found her just outside my place, I was totally thrilled
but at the time, I didn’t have anything else to put her in, so I decided to temporarily
hold her in this plastic water bottle, until I could place her into something more suitable,
perhaps an AC Test Tube or Test Tube Portal, but before I could do all that, I was shocked
to discover that within just a day, the queen had broken off her wings within the bottle,
and had proceeded to lay eggs. Talk about eager to get started on founding a colony!
From the looks of things, most of these eggs are still freshly laid,
not more than a couple days old, and none of them have hatched yet into larvae from what I can
tell. So cool to see how the eggs have a clear liquid part and more solid white part to them.
I wonder how they taste for breakfast with a side of bacon. Just kidding!
She stands protectively over her eggs,
and periodically cleans each one, with her antiseptic saliva to keep them germ and mold-free.
AC Family, what should we name this queen?
Let me know your name suggestions in the comments, and your AC Senate and
I will choose our top 5 favourite for all of us to vote on in a future video.
So if you’re new to weaver ants,
be prepared to be mind-blown because not only does this queen’s super unique colour
make her a special gem for ant keepers, but their lifestyle is truly one of a kind!
We’ve had weaver ants on this channel before: a massive colony we called the Emerald Empire. So
these ants don’t nest in the soil like other ants, but nest arboreally exclusively within
the leaves of trees and bushes. They are called weaver ants because they pull leaves together
and use the silk produced by their larvae to essentially glue these pulled in leaves together,
kind of like our spiny ants, as you saw in a previous episode, featuring our Blades of Midas,
however our spiny ants don’t typically use living leaves to build their nests
like true weaver ants do. And the fact that the leaves are alive makes a tonne of difference,
because it means that within the nests of these weaver ants,
the air is perfectly humidified due to the tree or plant’s natural transpiration process where the
plant releases water vapour. Not only that, but the plant continues to take in the carbon dioxide
the ants breathe out within the nest, and replaces it with fresh oxygen for the ants to breathe in.
It’s pretty amazing, right?! That’s some serious in-home air quality control. And the ants actually
rely on the plant constantly regulating their nest environment like this so much,
that once the leaves of the nests die or wilt due to not getting enough sunlight over time, the ants
go on to build another leaf nest with fresh new leaves at another location of the tree or plant.
We’ve watched this process while keeping the Emerald Empire many times, and I must say,
I miss keeping them. Sadly, during the pandemic I had to release them
along with many other ant colonies I was keeping, back into the wild, due to lockdown
in my city making it hard to get them feeders. It was sad, but I promised myself that one day,
we would have weaver ants again on the channel, and finally, that day has come!
But AC Family, there is something we need to do first before we continue. This bottle
is actually quite humid and damp now, but she will need a source of fresh water to drink
from so I’m going to need to open this bottle and stick in a wet cotton ball. Wish me luck!
I moved in to slowly unscrew the bottle cap.
It was important we didn’t disturb her too much because I didn’t want her to make a dash
and abandon her eggs or get too stressed and later eat her eggs, which can happen.
Alright, yes! Bottle cap off, and now placing in the wet cotton ball
as carefully as possible. Sorry, your highness just giving you some clean water, and in!
Success! Alright! Screwing the bottle cap back on.
Now all I have to do is constantly rewet this cotton swab every few days with a pipette.
Look at her cute face, looking at us.
I think she was a bit startled but not too stressed out thankfully.
It’s actually important that she constantly is in defense-mode right now
because in the wild, she would be stationed like she is here in this bottle within a hole in a tree
or opportune curl on a leaf. Until her eggs mature enough to become larvae that can spin her silk,
she and her young are usually pretty exposed to the elements, and not sealed in a protected
claustral cell underground like most other ants. For this first stage of founding,
this queen had she been in the wild, would have had to fend off potential predators
and even other ants from eating her and her brood.
I think she instantly felt this water bottle was like a comfy large leaf fold or tree hollow. Once
the larvae appear, she’ll be using them to spin her a protective chamber made completely of silk.
I actually can’t wait to film this founding process
because scientists actually don’t know a lot about how these weaver ant colonies start.
We suspect that they are polygynous and that many of these pregnant queens come together
and just start laying a bunch of eggs, but when I have tried to raise multiple weaver ant queens
together, they always ended up killing each other. Perhaps, the ants establish a sort of hierarchy
during this founding stage and beta queens are driven to other parts of the tree
or plant to start secondary friend colonies adjacent to the colony of the alpha queen.
I actually don’t know.
The Emerald Empire was already captured as a mature colony and moved themselves into
a money plant I gave them in a large terrarium. They weren’t farmed by me from just a queen ant.
And for hobbyists, weaver ant colonies are actually notoriously hard to get started
from just single founding queens, and all my personal attempts in the past to get them
to found from just captured queens have always failed. I get as far as a couple dozen workers,
but the colonies don’t seem to grow past that point and end up failing and dying out,
not even wanting to move onto a plant I give them. I feel in the past, there was a missing character
in their husbandry that I was not providing, but I am determined to try again and get it right,
properly documenting it all so we can learn how these weaver ants get their colonies started.
Let’s hope this weaver ant queen comes out successful.
Now, about the thing I saw in her body, AC Family, check this out! I was staring at her fat abdomen,
and noticed a weird ‘pulsating’. See it? It was like something within her was moving in waves.
AC Family, what do you guys think this is? Could this be her heart beat? The heart of an ant is
actually a long tube that pumps colorless blood called hemolymph from the head throughout the
body and then back up to the head again, but this looks more like a muscular contraction of some
sort. Could this be evidence of breathing, perhaps a breathing mechanism or muscle that pumps air in
and our of her breathing holes known as spiracles. Let me know, guys, what you think it is.
Either way, it was pretty cool that we now had a new and awesome queen ant to join our family.
And speaking of finding queen ants, I know a lot of you watching these videos
have expressed a desire to try ant keeping, too, and that truly makes me so happy,
because if you haven’t realized it yet, it’s a very fulfilling not to mention educational hobby!
And, I have some great news for you!
Did you know 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! We also have a helpful forum
and ant colony trading marketplace on the site. Visit AntsCanada.com today.
There’s nothing more satisfying than growing a big and thriving ant colony from just its
humble and precious beginnings. We ant keepers get to witness the miracle of it all every day,
and with enough luck and unlimited ant love, we just might be able to bring weaver ants back to
the channel to take their place as one of the coolest, most ultimate ants in the entire world!
Emerald Empire 2.0, guys? What do you say? Perhaps an even bigger setup at the new Ant House soon?
By next week these eggs will hatch into larvae, and hopefully we’ll get to see the next stage
of weaver ant colony founding, the queen’s building of a web chamber. So, don’t forget
to subscribe to the channel, and hit the BELL for Notifications Squad to be part of this new journey
and of our ever growing AC Family! Also, I’ve left a hidden cookie for you here
for those of you ant lovers who just want to continue watching extended play footage
of our beautiful, green weaver ant queen to the sounds of some relaxing music.
Until next week, thank you all for watching and supporting the ants. It’s ant love forever!