Ant update

When we last left the ants, they had connected some old tunnels and seemed to want to clear out the entire left side of the box they're in, but they hadn't done much new tunnelling besides that. A day or two after I posted, they began making a cross-box tunnel, starting from the bottom right and going to the left in a slight uphill direction. Actually, they finished it in one night; they had done quite a bit when we got home from work and by the end of the evening they'd connected the new tunnel to the mess of tunnels and holes on the left side of the box.

A couple of days ago, after wondering why the ants seemed to prefer to gather at the left side of the box, we turned the box around, thinking it might have something to do with the light (the left side of the box is more towards the living room windows). And light does seem to have something to do with it because they still gravitate to the left. Today they started work on a new tunnel which is nearly identical to the other cross-box tunnel they dug, going at the same slight angle up, so the two together almost make an X when you look through the box. Here, a photo shows it a lot better than me explaining:



All sorts of places for them to crawl around now. I'm not sure they would have made this tunnel though if we hadn't turned the box around, but at least they did make another large tunnel, I almost thought they had quit with the digging.