Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2011 17:53:05 GMT 1
Soooo... it's been quite a while since I've read or posted anything here, no worries - I am back I have decided to keep my ant's for the ride (which has and I guess will be delayed one more time). I broke up the resettling procedure into three steps - 1st - I will carefully flood the "park", or the "outside world" part of the setup forcing the ants to get back into the slim formicarium, 2nd - I will block and expose the slim setup to light again enforcing the ants to move to the last safe part of the setup - the y tong nest, final step is the exact same thing the other way around
>>>skip to here, cause I got excited all of a sudden and decided some of you might be interested.
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I came up across this, very common problem of how to keep the ant's escaping from the "park"... I spent a whole lot of time experimenting with vasiline, petroleum jelly - scented chalk - pepper... NONE of that worked I was so frustrated with my stupidity in the end, when finding out how simple it was... With the solid lids on the humidity levels shot sky high - NOT good for Lasius Niger with the lids off the ant's started escaping, the solution was, never gonna believe it - masking tape. At first I just taped it, so that 1/3 of the tape would cover the glass - and the rest would go sticky side horizontally over the edge towards the inside of the setup... this way it worked for a short while, then the ant's quickly figured out that the sticky surface is easy to trespass it. Then I turned to something more powerful - transparent tape and duck was a total massacre... The ant's got stuck on them - you can't get them off without killing them, the corpses and stuck ant's attract the rest. In the conclusion - I ended up killing about 40 ant's though I managed to save some... The solution was - taping the masking tape vertically around the setup - worked like a charm - the sticky surface for the ant's to pass is a bit more than 1.5 cm - and I have this set up for a month now - NOT A SINGLE ESCAPE! ;D I am absolutely not sure why they won't or do not want to pass it - but they just keep walking around the ridge and never try to pass it upwards... hopefully someone will find this being useful... AND hopefully this is not a repeated post ;D shame on me if it is...
>>>skip to here, cause I got excited all of a sudden and decided some of you might be interested.
____________________________________________________
I came up across this, very common problem of how to keep the ant's escaping from the "park"... I spent a whole lot of time experimenting with vasiline, petroleum jelly - scented chalk - pepper... NONE of that worked I was so frustrated with my stupidity in the end, when finding out how simple it was... With the solid lids on the humidity levels shot sky high - NOT good for Lasius Niger with the lids off the ant's started escaping, the solution was, never gonna believe it - masking tape. At first I just taped it, so that 1/3 of the tape would cover the glass - and the rest would go sticky side horizontally over the edge towards the inside of the setup... this way it worked for a short while, then the ant's quickly figured out that the sticky surface is easy to trespass it. Then I turned to something more powerful - transparent tape and duck was a total massacre... The ant's got stuck on them - you can't get them off without killing them, the corpses and stuck ant's attract the rest. In the conclusion - I ended up killing about 40 ant's though I managed to save some... The solution was - taping the masking tape vertically around the setup - worked like a charm - the sticky surface for the ant's to pass is a bit more than 1.5 cm - and I have this set up for a month now - NOT A SINGLE ESCAPE! ;D I am absolutely not sure why they won't or do not want to pass it - but they just keep walking around the ridge and never try to pass it upwards... hopefully someone will find this being useful... AND hopefully this is not a repeated post ;D shame on me if it is...