Lost two workers in the past few days, new colony
Looking for some help, kiddo wanted ants for the most recent birthday and since we’d failed before (using Amazon kits oops) I went looking to try to do it right this time so I called up tarheel ants, figured out options, picked out Camponotus chromaoides and a mini hearth set up.
We got it, set it all up, ants took a couple days to move from the tube into the habitat. We stuck a bit of sterile leaf litter in the outworld, and have a heat cable because our house stays pretty cool.
They’d gotten up to 10 workers, but late last week kiddo found a dead one. Went looking online and had an oh shit moment because for some reason I’d interpreted the feeding situation as honey being an optional offering so we hadn’t been messing with honey, just mealworms and fruit flies. So we got the dead worker out of there and added a little bit of honey.
Found another dead worker this morning.
Additionally it would appear that they’ve decided to put their refuse in a corner next to the water reservoir, it isn’t moldy at the moment that I can see but I’m sure it will be, I assume this may be part of what’s going on as well (now that we’ve got honey on the menu). How are we supposed to get that out of there if they aren’t moving it up into the outworld? My concern is that we can’t really tip the thing without dumping water everywhere, but also opening up the front is potentially gonna result in ants coming out.
Also once we figure out how to clean that out how do we convince them that the outworld is the place to stick their trash? They dragged one old mealworm back out, but that seems to have been an isolated event unless they’re doing the same for the dead ants (which have both been in the outworld also).
Kiddo was proper upset over the two losses so far so I’d really like to help get things dialed in, we were feeling so positive before and now I’m a little concerned I misread or misunderstood everything.
Any help would be appreciated, we’d really like this colony to do well and stay with us for a long time. Please be gentle, I’m just a mom trying to do the right thing.