
One day a few months ago, I had a dilemma where I had more Nylanderia queens than I had test tubes. To fix this, I decided to combine some of them into pairs, in the hope that they might go on to found a multi queen colony. #1 was a fail, with both queens dying for unknown reasons, #2, which was a success, and #3, which ended with one queen killing the other one, and the remaining ant founded a colony.


In the above image, one of the nanitics (the furthest one to the left) is cleaning the gaster of another. I do not see this very often, but it is super cute when I see it.