Fascinating, an ant colony!

An ant colony lives in our house and I today saw them fighting with a small beetle. Though these ants are small, and have many holes in our house XD
 

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
I live in the UK (meaning our ants are mostly Lasius niger) but when I was on holiday in Spain a couple of years ago I observed two ant species fighting over some crumbs. One was much bigger and easily beat the smaller ones in a fight (there were multiple casualties) but seemed to be a bit less intelligent in how they gathered the food. The smaller ants had losses but dragged the food nearer to their nest to harvest from.
 

Durburz

Worker
@mike I suspect you may have seen a clash between Lasius Niger and Tetramorium Caespitum sp. as they are quite common throughout Europe (both the species and the clashes between species). I own a colony of both species myself too. I have myself "adopted" a wood ant colony in the forest close to my city, as you don't want these in your house for various reasons. Last year as I was observing them, I noticed an arboreal ant species close by being attacked by wasps. I have a video recording of this air assault on the arboreal nest. The ants all lined themselves in the entrance of the nest, effectively bodyblocking any wasp that tried to enter. They were tiny and the wasps were atleast 4x to 5x their size. The wasps also seemed to join via pheromone trail, as more and more were joining the fray. You could hear the clicks and clacks of the mandibles closing during the fierce battle. I didn't have enough time to watch the outcome of the siege.
2 weeks later I returned to the tree and the ant colony was missing. Luckily though, I found another colony 3 trees further (maybe they even moved because of the constant threat of wasp harassment). Another interesting find around this tree was that within 3m2 around the arboreal nest, I found a Lasius niger/alienus nest + myrmica rubra nest + formica fusca workers foraging, without any of the 4 ant species fighting each other.
Sorry for the long post, as I have another story to share about a multimillion sized colony of formica rufa that I have seen in the south of the Netherlands, where I went for a short holiday (I come from the north). Me and my girlfriend went into nature because I always want to spot ants in the wild, where we found a huge and open heathland. There, I spotted large ant highways carved into the sand and forest floor, all leading to the centre of the field. This area, which is roughly the size of 2 football fields, were all highways leading to a huge polydomous colony (I stopped counting after 20 domes). Everywhere you went were just scores of ants passing one another, going to and from the forest around the heathland with highways stretching about 50 metres from the nest in all directions. It was the most majestic ant colony I have seen so far. Because there were no humans around for a couple kilometres, I suspect this colony may have been 10-12+ years old if not older and remained completely untouched. #endoflongpost
 
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