It is essential to have prior knowledge before having ants. We particularly recommend the book Criar Hormigas de Raul Martinez. (click here)
Caution: We ship ONLY 1 COLONY or queen and ONLY 1 SPECIES per order or ant's nest, so you must choose correctly the one you want. We do not charge for the ants. They are FREE. You only have to pay for the shipping costs.
You will receive the ants inside a test tube with food and water for two weeks. They were born inside the test tube and they are well there.
Difficulty of breeding: difficult
The colony is formed by the queen, 5-10 workers (its children) and eggs, larvae and cocoons.
Instructions about the breeding of Camponotus ligniperdus:
This species is one of the largest of Europe, especially the queen. It can become the longest ant in Europe. In nature they mainly live milking aphids and eating dead insects. You can feed them with nutritious substitutes of aphid's treacle, as the nutritious syrup (anthouse.es) and insects already dead.
Once you have received the ant colony, the first thing to do is to feed it if possible (water with sugar and derivatives). If there are too many ants, the best thing to do is to put them directly into the nest.
To feed the ants inside the test tube you can use a syringe. Insert the syringe needle through the cotton plug and put a droplet. This droplet must not be large because the ants could drown. Once they have drunk, remove the excess. A cotton bud can be used to clean, but be careful when you remove the plug because the ants can escape.
You can keep the ants in the test tube used for transportation as long as there is water inside. If you keep them inside the tube you must feed them at least twice a week.
To put the ants in the ant nest there are two methods:
- Pour out the contents into the nest, tapping to drop the ants off the tube.
- Place the tube, without the plug, in the ant nest or in the foraging area and wait the ants to relocate by themselves. This may require a lot of patience (days or weeks).
General details:
They need to hibernate, so it is not recommended to control the temperature in winter. They can be at room temperature in the house. In late February and early March, with the arrival of spring, it must be at a temperature of about 28-30 degrees. They need this temperature for proper development. Without these temperatures the breeding will develop very slowly.
For its development you should give them liquid substances such as nutritious syrup (anthouse.es), honey with milk and freshly dead insects (flies, crickets, silverfish, mealworms, etc.) to obtain proteins in abundance. It is VERY IMPORTANT that the ants have a source of water (especially in summer), either through water troughs, water gel, directly sipping from the humidity system (ground), etc.
Sizes:
- Queen: 15-16mm
- Workers: 15-10mm
