Good day guys!
Viewer Discretion is advised because this post will be about insects.
Have you ever been into exotic pets before?
When I was younger, I was fascinated by insects. I stumbled upon a YouTube channel called AntsCanada. This introduced me to the hobby of Ant Keeping. The channel gave guides and tips on how to raise Ants. This was the first setup of my ants. It all started with one single fertilized queen.
You can spot an ant queen during their nuptial flights. A nuptial flight is when male and female ants from different colonies of the same species mate to start a colony. After the male mates with the female ant, the male and dies. And the female usually sheds its wings and it will look for a place to start the colony. If you look closely, you can distinguish a queen ant by its gaster because it's larger than usual.
This species is a fully claustral species, meaning you don't have to feed it during its founding stage. You just have to keep it in a dark place and leave it alone so you won't stress out the queen. If you stress out the queen there's a chance that it won't lay eggs and it would even eat her own brood. That's one thing that I love about taking care of ants, you don't have to check on them every single day and they are low maintenance.
This photo below shows my colony now which came from that single queen. I have hundreds of them already. If you look at the chambers, you could see that those are all brood. This is actually my 1st successful colony after how many years of trying. I remember I tried taking care of other ants these past years, but most of them died and one colony escaped. I just got back into the hobby after 4 years.
My colonies that died were because of other invasive ants( I think they were pharaoh ants), Here's one experience, I remember trying to feed my colony which was in an aquarium setup, and left it overnight. The next time I checked on it the ants were getting the food and killing my queen ant. This is where I can say that I love taking care of ants but I also hate the invasive outdoor ants. There was also one thing that pushed me into ant keeping now and it's finding sustainable food which is my cockroaches. I'm still looking for a place where to rehouse all these ants.
Last Year, my ant colony already started and I said to myself that I need food for them. Instead of trying to breed mealworms, I saw this post from an aqua hobbyist on Facebook that he's selling Dubia cockroaches. At first, I was hesitant but I thought that I could sell these things in the future if I try to breed them so I ordered 50 pieces of them for 4 Php each.
I have them for less than a year and I have a colony that is reproducing. I probably have a hundred Dubia cockroaches in this bin.
I also like taking care of them because they are low maintenance. You just need to replace their food and water. I also give them some of our kitchen scraps and they devour them. I like this species because they don't smell bad. My only bad experience about taking care of them are those stupid pesky ants that invaded them and killed around 20ish.
My cousin started buying tarantulas. I asked my cousin if he could get me a trap door spider to give to my younger brother. And I gave it to him as a present. After that, he started buying tarantulas. If I'm not mistaken he's taking care of 10 tarantulas right now.
It's really amusing to see him enter my room every morning just to check on how they are.
We also have the same mortal enemy and they are the invasive ants. They also tend to attack these spiders though it never happened yet, we just saw posts about that online.
This spider was funny, my brother accidentally left a dubia cockroach inside the container and it was digging all around. This spider chased it down and ate it.
My brother has spiderlings, so me and my cousin decided to set up another cockroach farm which are the blatta lateralis. They are a lot smaller than the dubia and they reproduce faster. There's one thing that I hate about them and it's their smell.
These are my special cockroaches and they are Madagascar Hissing Cockroach- Black Tiger. I already have them for how many months and they are still not breeding. I had to rehouse them today because it was starting to get messy.
They are huge cockroaches, and their legs really feel uncomfortable when I'm holding them. I just hope that they reproduce soon.
Before I end this post, here's Yoda our cat. He's the warden inside my room because there are instances when my bin wasn't secured before, Some male dubias would escape. When I was busy using my computer, I checked on Yoda and he was playing with something in his mouth and it was a cockroach. That's how he became the warden of my room. I hope that you enjoyed reading.
Thanks for reading and Stay safe always!
The photos used in this post are owned by me .
