🐜 Camponotus nicobarensis – Week 6 | The First New Worker Has Arrived

The colony was started in May 2026 and is now showing its first clearly visible development steps.

👉 The first new worker has finally emerged. 🎉

This is the first visible colony growth since the founding stage.

🥚 First Successful Development

The brood development was already clearly visible over the past weeks.

Now, the first new worker has finally emerged from it.

In small Camponotus colonies, development often takes longer because only a few workers are available to:

That makes this first visible progress even more exciting to observe.

At the same time, activity inside the arena has increased noticeably again.

Workers are now:

The whole setup now feels much more alive compared to a few weeks ago.

So far, the colony mostly accepted only very small protein sources.

However, interest in larger food pieces now slowly seems to increase as well.

With every additional worker, the colony appears slightly more active and confident during foraging.

The colony is still mainly living inside the test tube.

The lightly humidified plaster nest is not being used as a real nest yet, but the workers are now spending more time inside it.

I still give the colony complete freedom of choice and simply continue observing how the behavior develops.

Even though the colony is still small, this moment feels like real progress.

The first new worker, the increasing activity and the slowly developing organization make this phase especially exciting to watch.

For me, these early colony stages are some of the most interesting moments in antkeeping.

Over the next weeks, I’m especially curious about:

👉 How long did it take for your Camponotus colonies to produce their first new workers?