Ant keeping blog #1

  As said before, I got the ant queens. Specifically 3, thank god because I only had 3 test tubes ready.

  All the tubes are cleaned, sanitized and with the queens already inside. They have stayed there for 2 days? Or 1 day, I can't really remember, but I wrote the date down so I can make notes. There will be a note on the tubes with the day I put them inside.

  Today, the ants were given a small amount of honey too. In order to help them calm down fast and get used to the tubes.

  As I said in the previous entry, the identification of the queens is also important. I've already started gathering different species that can be an option.

    Identification process:

   First, we can confidently say that all three of the ants are the same genome and species. They are practically identical, and the only differences are in the size, but not proportions or shape of body parts. 

  Camponotus https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Camponotus

   Second, from the visual inspection and due to my geographic location, I can also identify them as camponotus ants. One of the biggest and most divers ant genus due to how common they are. Being the first most common ant type in Europe. 

  In south Europe, many variations of this genus exist among modern human housing. Some inside as pests and others outside, occasionally entering buildings for sources of food or other resources. But in this case, the ants were located and captured in a rural farming location.

  It's important to know why this is so fundamental. In ant keeping the control over the colony of ants and their artificial environment also comes with the responsibility of providing them everything that their specific species could need for a happy and healthy existence. When purchased, the ants are already identified and their "family tree" is very clear. On the other hand, there's virtually no way of finding a specific location where a non-captive young ant queen was born.

  The most common type of camponotus in Europe is camponotus fallax. These ants live in dead trees, twigs of living trees and in the wooden parts of buildings. Often seen as pests for a household because of their ability of using the smallest decay of wood to penetrate it and create bigger crevasses for their colony to reside in. 

  In this case, the possible reality is that the queens flew from the closest ant colonies. Them being located in the garden, neighboring forest or road. In case of the garden, there are many ants living between stones and plant roots.

  Latter I'll observe them more carefully with a better camera, but for now let's assume it's camponotus piceus.  https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Camponotus_piceus

Images from open sources for visual examples