Good news, guys!
We've newborns! Our ant family is bigger now!
About 1 months ago we bought an ant farm. We had Queen Ant and about 20 kids of hers.
We take care of them very much, we really love our insect pets and try to make comfort conditions and good food for them.
And our Queen feels Ok I hope because she makes new eggs.
And now we've a super chance to see all steps of development of an egg into a real newborn ant. It's extremely interesting even for us, adults, me and my hubby. My son is inspired by them very much too鉂わ笍
Neither me, nor my hubby knew that this very process of ant birth is SO complicated and long.
It takes some weeks!
And every egg has different steps of development.
Now I'll show you those that I managed to save in photos.
It's really hard to make photos because our ants don't like bright light and always are very nervous under it. And start to run very very fast trying to find secure place for their eggs and newborns.
They are very caring!
But I tried to keep some moments of ant birth for our family story;)
It's Mom - Queen with her kids and new eggs and larvas
larvas differ in their size too - it depends on the kind of ant who will be born from it - an ordinary ant or a "soldier". They are bigger.
actually eggs are very tiny, it;s just small circles, we can't see them here, these white pieces are larvas - the next stage of their development
do you see different colours of larvas?
at first they are white
then they become darker, closer to yellow
then they become brown
then - dark brown with eyes!! really a larva with tiny black eyes;)
Look here!
it's unbelivable, yeah?
we even see small insect paws there!
It looks like a human embryo so much, right??馃槏
We were waiting very much when we could see the process of birth. And we saw it!
Actually, not in details because all other ants make a cirle around a larva that is transforming into a newborn. They helped it somehow, I think. But when they go away we can see a real small ant!
And we can differ him from others - he, better to say she (most ants are females) is lighter - light brown colour!
Look
do you see? black ants - are adults, 2 brown are babies;)
It's our newborns:)
They run very slow at first, and prefer to stay near other larvas and eggs, but in a few days they are very fast and powerful like all the rest.
We've discovered so much about ant during this month of their life with us!
And it's the best experience for a kid to study something in practice and to see everything by his own eyes.