ah, I see. good thinking! I've always liked that concept of the vertical.
Hi I've been having a hard time feeding my camponotus they are still mainly living off of honey water, they wont eat the crickets I've tried to feed them any moths any fruit or even cooked meat. is there any tips i can get there is about 13 workers in there with the queen. the nest is a year old in July.
Here is a link to a post on another forum. It has the preferred food of many different species, including Camponotus pennsylvannicus. I've followed it for my ants, and they've accepted the recommended foods. I wouldn't be surprised if it worked for your ants as well.
+1 for following this guide. I have a small Camponotus penn. colony myself and I can confirm that the information on Formiculture is accurate for my colony. I've been having a lot of success with freshly crushed crickets that I am raising myself on a diet of Total Bites cricket food from Nature Zone. I've been trying to get my ants to eat it so when I have people take care of my colony its easy to feed, but they don't seem too interested. I've also fed honey, apples, and a test tube with sugar water mix in addition to a test tube with regular water. I can confirm that mine had zero interest in mealworms and cooked chicken.
Don't get me wrong, this forum is great. Formiculture's a bit older and therefore has more information.
We're having the same issue with our camponotus, shes been trying to die on us since we caught her. Its been about 22 months since her nanitics have arrived she got up to about 25 workers. Then we set the test tube setup in the outworld of an omni nest vertical. Within 2 days they moved out of the test tube. I think it was too soon for them because now shes down to one worker and we've moved her back to the test tube setup. We have them setup to a test tube portal. Shes got a good clutch of about 15 eggs but they hardly ever eat. We have to put a drop of honey in the end of her test tube to get them to eat it. They dont touch crickets or superworms no matter how we do it. we now raise dubia roaches and they don't seem to be eating those either. I have only seen them eat from a piece of apple once. We have our camponotus test tube portal setup inside of an empty exo-terra terrarium with our aphaenogaster picea test tube portal setup. We're trying to replace the water in both portals so we have one new water test tube blacked out per portal while having light on the old water test tubes. Its been two weeks and neither queen has moved. Our aphaenogaster water is almost gone and the cotton ball is moldy on the claustral chamber side only. It's not the whole cotton ball but its still enough mold to worry us because the queen, brood, and workers are all in direct contact with the cotton that has mold on it. The camponotus test tube has more water left and no mold so we're less worried about her staying aside from the fact her brood is only at about stage 2 from egg to worker.