Many eggs!

The Pachycondyla queens I collected three days ago have layed many eggs. This is one of them:

This big girl is carrying a bundle of 5. She seems to be a caring mother ;)

New Pachycondyla striata queens

Yesterday I was able to go into the woods and I was fortunate to collect a few Pachycondylas which I believe to be Pachycondyla striata. I collected three solitary female alates, a group of two and a group of four. This is a picture with one of the alates:

I put the group of four in a big plastic shoebox:

They quickly settled in and around a small "house" I built for them of damp cotton wool and a piece of cardboard on top.

Pachycondyla striata queen?

I was coming back from dinner where I work and I saw this huge Pachycondyla walking on the curb alongside the road. Luckily one of my colleagues had a plastic cup and the ant was really happy to go in there because of the Coke drops still in the cup.

I believe it is a queen of Pachycondyla striata (same species as the other I have which is not a queen) because this one is bigger and has scars indicating wings were probably there in the past. Let's wait and see if it will start laying eggs.

Look at how big it is compared to the Lenovo mouse:

Here is a short video of it. I believe the wing scars can be seen (if they are indeed wing scars).

New eggs

My Pachycondyla has been having a lot of protein lately (insects) and has two eggs. She had another one but it vanished (I think she might have eaten it, but I'm not sure. They are so small and difficult to see that maybe she had stored it somewhere and I hadn't noticed). Anyway, yesteday I was looking at her feeding and noticed she was carrying something which looked like an egg between her mandibles. When I looked closer I was pretty happy to see not one but two :)

She is storing them in one of the chamber in her plaster nest. They are very small, but I believe you will be able to see them in the pictures.

They are the dirty yellow things, on the first pictures they are bundled together and on the last ones they are separate, close to each other.

Moth? No thanks

I put half a moth in for my Pachycondyla. It checked it out and nibbled on it, but wasn't very interested and I had to take it out.

New ant

Yesterday I came accross a big ant in my dad's house and I picked it up. I have so far been unable to identify it. It measures about 20 mm, here are some pictures I took this morning:

I also made a short video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcE6iqsUGJk

Whatever this species is, it looks really interesting. I hope this is a queen, or at least a gamergate (if this species allows it) and I hope I can start a colony with it.

I have it in a plaster nest with some sugar and some live termites. It ate some sugar but so far didn't touch the termites (not even any aggressive behaviour towards them yet). Let's see when I get home.