Over the last ten days, I have caught an incredibly excessive amount of Brachymyrmex depilis queen ants. The said amount was 220 queens. These minute yellow ants possess the tiniest workers in my local area and apparently require extreme humidity for their brood to develop. This has made keeping them challenging, with my best attempt only reaching three workers before failing. However, this year, I decided to change my strategy.
Instead of just putting a few queens in each test tube nest, which has been questionably effective, I allowed the queens to decide which tube they would nest in. To do this, I created a space I called a chaos chamber. A chaos chamber is just an escape-proof container with some test tube nests in it. The results were rather unexpected, with large numbers of queens consistently clumping into singular nests. This strategy by the ants may be a gamble, as this could either lead to a large, successful colony, or an absolute disaster. The only way to see if this can work is to simply wait for several months and see what happens. The reason the ants clumped like this is because they are polygynous, meaning they will tolerate many queens in one nest.
