Today I decided to experiment by feeding my ant colonies pieces of watermelon. Naturally, the first ants to receive a taste of watermelon were my two Tapinoma sessile colonies. Turns out, they love eating watermelon. The first of these is a four-queen supercolony collected on April 20th. The second, on the other hand, is a one-queen colony collected on April 21st. However, at first, I couldn’t find an egg-laying queen in this colony. For a few unnerving days, I feared that either I had missed or accidentally killed the queen. That was until one night when I decided to feed them. I pulled the cotton blocker out of one test tube, and to my complete surprise and relief, the queen, for some reason, ran at full speed out of the test tube. Thankfully, she was never close to escaping. Turns out, she had merely been hiding from me. The workers hid her incredibly well. I slept much better that night knowing there was an egg-laying queen safely inside the colony.
