Flowers and more flowers

The Acromyrmex sp. has been working hard in her fungus garden. In just a few days its size has increased almost tenfold.

Here is a close up (as much as my iPhone will allow it) of her putting the yellow petals in the garden. You can see the tiny bits everywhere on top of the fungus.

Blooming garden

The other Acromyrmex has doubled the size of her "surrogate" garden in one day. Pretty impressive. She is always cutting up leaves and tending to it, it's cool to watch her on her hourly chopping chores :)

Early Christmas Gift

Besides the Acromyrmex cf. octospinosis, I have chosen to keep one of the queens I was able to collect of another Acromyrmex species. These queens are a bit bigger than the octospinosis, and have a darker color too.

I left the queen I kept for a week to check if she would start her garden on her own. I have checked on her every morning. This morning I noticed that although she still had not developed any fungus, she already had a big pile of eggs on top of a leaf. This made me scrap my plan of waiting and act, so I got a tiny bit of fungus (about a tenth) of the octospinosis' garden. As soon as I popped the bit of fungus in, she rushed to spread her eggs in it and started furiously cutting up tiny bits of leaves to feed the fungus with. So maybe all she needed was this small jumpstart :)