Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Myrmecocystus mexicanus is a species of ant in the genus Myrmecocystus, which is one of the six genera that bear the common name "honey ant" or "honeypot ant", due to curious behavior where some of the workers will swell with liquid food until they become immobile and hang from the ceilings of nest chambers, acting as living food storage for the colony.
The smaller colony contained six wingless queens. The larger colony had 66 chambers containing repletes, with a maximum of 191 repletes in a chamber. The largest replete was 15 millimetres long and had a mass of 1.4 grams. The nest had a maximum depth of 1.7 metres, and tunnels stretched 2.4 metres from the nest entrance.
Myrmecocystus (from Koine Greek μυρμήκιον [mýrmikion], meaning "ant", and κύστις [kýstis], meaning "bladder" or "sac"), is a North American genus of ants in the subfamily Formicinae. It is one of five genera that includes honeypot ants . [ 2 ]
Ant colonies can be long-lived. The queens can live for up to 30 years, and workers live from 1 to 3 years. Males, however, are more transitory, being quite short-lived and surviving for only a few weeks. [69] Ant queens are estimated to live 100 times as long as solitary insects of a similar size. [70]
Myrmecocystus testaceus is a species of honeypot ant found throughout the southern United States. It is usually nocturnal, and nests in sand. [1] They can spray formic acid from their gasters to melt skin tissue. Instead of stinging and swarming, they stretch their prey by the legs until it splits or dies from bites and formic acid.
Association with Myrmecocystus mexicanus [ edit ] Cole et al. surveyed the distribution of Myrmecocystus mexicanus nests, (a species of North American honey ant) relative to the distribution of P. occidentalis nests at a site in western Colorado and found that there was a definite spatial association between the two species.
This page was last edited on 2 December 2024, at 01:31 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
This page was last edited on 24 December 2024, at 10:38 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.