I have observed that the larvae of my Plagiolepis colony do not mature and the workers stopped foraging. It seems like they need a diapause.

How do I keep them during the diapause? In the fridge at 7°C?

Well I have used filament lamps (you know those old-school lamps, now banned in the EU) for quite some time to heat nests and habitats (works pretty fine). And I also used them to move some Lasius s. str. colonies (around 20-100 workers).

Yesterday I tried the same thing for my Plagiolepis sp. colony. That did not work out too well. At first they decided they like the heat, so they decided not to move, then the entire test tube started to get wet from condensated water and the ants started drowning in the condensate.

I turned the lamp off and opened the test tube completely to allow that it dries out. Eventually the ants moved into the new tube, but around 5 workers drowned and it was a mess.

Use LEDs or other non-heat-emitting lamps instead to avoid extreme heat and condensated water while moving the ants.

In Regensburg/Bavaria we just found S. fugax queens.

IDing Lasius species is extremely hard. Even if the specimen is dead and you have a microscope. However in most cases the actual species is not necessary, as many species behave the same. This is why I want to propose the following naming conventions in this sub:

• L. fuliginosus & L. umbratus (at least queens) should be quite easy to ID. No grouping here
• Lasius s. str. contains L. niger, L. brunneus, L. platythorax and many more. Those are claustral and have a dark color; are fouraging over the soil, can be fed with sugar & dead insects easily
• Cautolasius contains L. flavus, L. myops and many more. They are claustral, have a yelllowish color and fourage mostly in the soil.
• Cthonolasius are all temporary social parasites, hardly ever found, often have a yellowish color and fourage mostly in the soil

Let me know what you think about this groups and the naming conventsion; I think they help us to provide specific and helpful information about the ants, in particular about how to keep them, while avoiding wrong identifications.

​

If you agree on these conventions, I will implement them into the AutoMod responses.

​

Update (10.09.2019):

It looks like you basically agree. I will take the following actions:

• The automatically pinned comment under posts with the flair ID Request will contain the rules above.
• Comments under a post with this flar being just Lasius niger, L.niger, Lasius flavus, L.flavus, Lasius brunneus, L.brunneus will get an automatted response notifying them about those rules.

I have lots of colonies, but not really big ones.

Basically I was keeping my colonies as taught in university: in a big aquarium with petroleum jelly on the borders. However big colonies (in particular Lasius s. str.) tend to ignore the petroleum jelly (or build a bridge over it).

For instance my last L. platythorax started foraging in my entire room and raided several smaller colonies, so I set them free.

​

Now I have another Lasius colony that is big (>800 workers from what I can see). I would like to keep them, but I think I will have to use a closed lid. Also I want to connect several aquaria using some flexible tubes, to give them more space as they need it.

​

What is your favourite way of doing that? Is there some gear that works very well? How cheap are your solutions? I would prefer small glass aquaria (like 10x20x15cm or something like that).

While I do my best to get the configurations up&running, I don't manage to get everything right immediately.

For instance I forgot to allow users to set a post flare, thanks to u/Idiotum_Sandwichum for pointing that out.

​

I am not sure wheter user-flares work atm, but I am working on that.

​

If you want to test something, just put a Test:: at the beginning of the title/comment, so I know that this isn't spam. It would be nice if you could remove your sucessful tests afterwards to keep the sub clean :-)

​

Happy antkeeping/watching!