Gift Recommendations

My first Holiday Gift Recommendations. You have to get ready for Cyber Monday.

1) Last year I bought Wingscapes's Bird Cam and enjoyed it. The only trouble was I'm not nearly as interested in birds as I am with plants and ants. It has other uses of course. I tried it out and liked it a lot. It's just there wasn't enough at the feeder to really hold my interest to keep up viewing. My first time using it, it was full of photos with terrible lighting. So time of day and angle are something that have to be learned from use. I wasn't about to edit 80 photos to find out if there were birds there. Sometimes it took pictures of someone walking by doing yard work. The Birdcam 2.0 has a flash though so this wouldn't have been a problem.

Second try though was much more successful. The lighting was better and we got one or two good bird pictures. I didn't keep them though because I thought they were nothing special. Finding that brilliant bird pic though is bound to happen, and an avid bird watcher is more likely to use this camera daily. It also does video which I don't think I ever got around to trying.

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2) Because of the success of their first camera, they've also released a Plant Camera. I'm happy to see the much cheaper price. The emphases here is more on time laps photos. You can do time laps on both cameras of course, but I believe the Plant Cam actually converts it into one big video. I don't own this one but I would assume it has a better lens for closeups. Might be good to see what butterflies are showing up plants too. I could personally see using this to capture ants excavating tunnels or possibly setup a bee swarm in an observation hive.

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Ants Use Bacteria to Make Their Gardens Grow

Ants use Bacteria to Make Their Gardens Grow

Says Suen: "Without nitrogen, there is no way these guys could achieve such large colony sizes. These ants are one of the most dominant insects in the Neotropics. The ability to have colonies with millions of ants is predicted to require a tremendous amount of nitrogen."

Eat the Weeds

This is a new series I recently started watching on YouTube. Let Green Deane teach you just how edible plants can be. His website is www.eattheweeds.com and he talks about a lot of our native fruits, as well a lot of plants gardeners normally weed out anyhow. See his complete series of videos here.

Pheidole pilifera (journal)

My Pheidole pilifera colony. Not that you can tell what they are though from this photo. These ants are incredibly small and normally nest in sand. This is the whole colony and they could all easily fit on the tip of my thumb. They're not digging into the plaster but are able to nibble at it. They do this mostly as a reaction to water, or in this case condensation that sometimes forms on the side. They probably won't dig tunnels into the plaster until they've expanded into the other chambers. That's a long ways off though.


They're in the middle chamber to the far right. The Test Tube is no longer in there of course, this is an old pic from the summer. I keep the surface area clean as best as I can. Black patches of mold grow if food is left there. It scrapes off easily though. I don't think I'm damaging the plaster at all. I'm really surprised that that's the only place where mold is growing. The whole setup is basically a sponge and only the parts with open access to air are really growing. Plaster setups really only last 2 years anyhow and it will be easy enough to move the colony.

Camponotus castaneus (journal)

Both colonies are still alive and to my surprise none of the workers have died yet. They're not in the most photo friendly setup and I haven't really been trying either. Both colonies have fair sized piles of brood too, comprised of probably all 2ed or 3rd instar larva. The winter brood, laid in August or September, develops much slower then past broods, sometimes stopping all together. This is to help remove stress on the colony to forage over the winter time. To many hungry larva and the ants will simply start eating them.

The room they're currently in is among the coldest in our hour. My hands are freezing just typing this and it's supposidly 56F outside. Lighting the fireplace down in the living room doesn't help much and hopefully my colonies do well because of it. I feed them a cricket once a week or whenever I see workers foraging. They don't so much forage as, I'll see a worker standing around in the foraging area.

I've wintered colonies in our refrigerator before but supposidly it's to dry an environment. This is okay for some ants as winter time usually doesn't offer any humidity at all. Certainly nothing far above 20% or 30%. They should still have access to humidity though to be safe. I've seen other people who remove Camponotus colonies and assume their queen didn't survive. The workers all wake up but the queen remains motionless and apparently dead. In actuality Camponotus queens tend actually go into a deeper hibernation and it may take some 2 or 4 more weeks of warm temperatures to bring her out of it. Filtering may help speed this up, a process I developed where the expired ant is placed on a damp tissue or towel and left there for some time. I normally use it to revive drown ants or those who've "died" from to much carbon-dioxide poisoning, usually from rotting insects in a closed space.

The other option with hibernating colonies is a cold basement or garage. The issue here is the ants need to be kept in above freezing temps. So they need to be in a well insulated container that still offers ventilation. They need ventilation because condensation can kill the ants. The other issue is mold. Basements with musky odors and especially ones that feel damp are teaming with mold spores. This is a sign that the basement itself has poor ventilation and isn't ideal for keeping a colony.