New nest idea

I recently came up with an idea for a mixed sand/loam and plaster nest. I put a colony of Pachycondyla striata in it to "test". The result looks quite good.

I first created a bit of plaster on one side of the shoe box, as so:

Then I put sand in and a little bit of loam on top (they can't dig in the sand, but can dig in the loam, and I did not want them digging but using the bit of plaster as nest instead). They are using one of the far side corners as rubbish dump:

On the bit of plaster I excavated a side chamber and also some underground chambers. As soon as I put the ants in, they proceeded to move the brood inside the plaster almost straight away. You can see the side here:

I made a mistake, however. I glued the top with silicon but I did not glue the bottom with anything. So the plaster lifted a little bit when I picked up the nest for the first time, and this created some space at the side and underneath. Sand went in and kind of flooded the underground chambers, and although the ants took the sand out, it is impossible to see what is going on underneath (and also there is an ugly space between the plaster and back wall. Something I will have to remedy somehow.

Building my first ant nest

Hi there. This is the ant nest I am building. It is almost done. I'll explain what has been done so far.

First I added plaster powder to a bit of water in a pot and mixed everything for several minutes. I then added more plaster powder in smal amounts until the mixture had the consistency of a tooth paste, mixing all the while. Then I left it to dry for about 24 hours. This is the result:

After 24 hours drying, I got the block off the pot with a bit of pushing and light whacking. It took me about 15 minutes to get it out. This is the plaster block:

Next step would be to carve out the chambers. Since I don't have a queen yet, I thought I might as well just make some "general" chambers. Ok, I'll come clean: I had no idea of what size they should be. Here's me starting off:

After a bit of work, some chambers are created:

 As you can see, you get a lot of leftovers from the carving of just 3 chambers.

After carving out more chambers, it was time to connect them. Again, I had no idea as to how to carve the passages, so I tried to make them about 1 cm in diameter (half a circle). Here's the result:

I then put it back in the plastic pot:

I measured it (sorry about the rule, it is broken in several places but it's the only one I had). You can get an idea of the height in this picture:

On the next two pictures, you can see the size of the biggest chamber (not that big at all but I hope big enough to do the trick):

This is the general size of the passageways:

It looks nice so far, I hope I can get a queen for it soon :)