Hello ,

Over the last few months, I have been busy with feeding and food acceptance experiments with the ants. The aim of these experiments are to determine the optimal food source for the ants that will keep them at a peak growth rate.

This week, however, I discovered that the ants do not touch the honey. The same honey that they have been eating all the time. They also refused to eat the cockroach that I gave them, which started to worry me.

There seemed to be a trend arising amongst all of the colonies. All of them have lost interest in the food that they have been given over and over again. I started to investigate the problem, is something wrong with the conditions they are living in, is the temperature too high, is the humidity now a problem, are the rain patterns we are experiencing affecting them? None of these questions led to a concrete answer.

I tried another experiment, colouring the ants through their food source. The idea has been done many times before and is very simple. Add some food colouring to a liquid food and let the ants eat it. So I mixed some sugar water and added a few drops of pink food colour. I gave all the ants a small dish (bottle cap) with some pink sugar water. To my surprise all of the foraging workers and many from the nest, flocked to the feeding dish to get some of the sugar water.

It turns out, the ants just got bored of eating the same food over and over again. This brings about a new challenge as the aim of the experiment has changed from finding an optimal food source to setting up a complete diet plan with sufficient variety.

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