My ants are lazy and rebellious.
Following the instructions I made 4 holes in the surface to get them started. They briefly nibbled on one of them and then ignored all 4 completely. Instead they started on their own holes.
All three holes were started in corners, and initially aimed straight down. The two next to each other were later joined by a tunnel. The short tunnel at the opposite end of the habitat is almost U-shaped, aiming for the 4th corner, but its other end hasn’t yet reached the surface yet.
They took some interesting approaches here and there. When they were working on their two main digs, 90% of the ants piled into one tunnel and only a few went for the other. This left the first tunnel so crowded that they often got stuck behind each other and couldn’t get out with the stuff they had dug out. So the 10%-tunnel grew much faster than the 90%-tunnel.
That tunnel “complex” has two loops: a short one along the end wall of the habitat, and a longer one that goes down and towards the middle. They completed the shorter loop first and used that to live in, and a few of them kept working on the longer one. The long loop was so narrow that the digging ants often had to come out backwards – they had no space to turn around. And they didn’t think of digging from both ends and meeting in the middle – even when they had almost rendez-voused with the shorter loop, they went the long way round.
And now they seem to have almost stopped digging. They just huddle in one of their two favourite tunnel sections, or walk around on the surface and the walls. And I suppose they must be eating, too. But no digging! They’re supposed to dig lots of tunnels, and here they are, just lazing around. What sort of ants are these, anyway?
On the whole they seem to be more interested in the walls of the box than in the gel. I’m supposed to let in a bit of air once a week or so, but there’s always a crowd of ants exploring the edges of the lid, so it’s hard to find a time when I can open the box without letting them all out.
I hope they do more digging soon. Otherwise I guess I will have to wait for them to die of old age and then hope that the next batch will spurn the old “house” and dig new digs.
That is so cool, thanks for the picture. I had an ant farm as a child, but it had sand in it and all the ants died after a while. This is much more interesting (hope your ants don’t die *thinks positively*).