 Are you really poor? Are you super rich? Well, it doesn't really matter. Today I'm going to be showing you guys in this video how to house your hands cheaply. Unless you click away. But don't click away. Just watch the video. Alright, let's get started. Now you might have seen in like online catalogs from the bigger companies that, you know, if you buy from a carry-on, they're really expensive. And while it's true that it's really hard to make a form of carry of yourself. That's as good and as, you know, nice looking as the ones you can find online. You can still house your app quality is really cheaply. If you don't really care about the look of the setup. Now if you only have one queen, right? And you just found her. Then honestly, the cheapest, most efficient and just all around the best way to house a single app queen is with the test tube like this one. Now these are really cheap. They're like a dollar each. You can get glass ones or plastic. Now I find that plastic ones tend to get scratched really easily on the inside when you're working with like tools inside. So a plastic one can't really be reused as much a glass test tube like this one I reused five times six times already for many different queens. So yeah, glass test tubes are really reusable, but plastic or glass test tubes both work perfectly fine for your queen. Now once you get your first workers, this is where a lot of people make mistakes. You know, I've seen a lot of beginners up. They have like three or four workers and they just say, Oh, I got workers. Put them in a form of carry on, right? And then they go and buy this huge form of carry on put the ants inside. And that's not not only is that bad for you at colony, if they have too much space, but it's also very stressful for them. Like and they're actually a, they put the garbage and some chambers of the form of carry on. They'll start molding and a host of problems will come up. Now the first thing you want to do once you get workers is actually just to keep them in the test tube. Like you don't even need to put them in an out world, just keep them in the tube. Like here you can see my lazyist colony, which has 25 around 30 to 25 workers and they're living this test tube perfectly fine. Now to decide when you need to upgrade to a bigger enclosure and set up, basically when you can no longer possibly work with them inside the test tube without, you know, workers escaping, et cetera, that's when you need to upgrade to a bigger tube. But before then, as long as you can, you know, take out their food and give them new food without workers crawling everywhere outside the tube, then you're still like perfectly fine. Now this lazyist colony will actually be moved to a bigger enclosure soon, bigger setup and there are a few options for what you can do here. One option is to move them into a professional form of carry on like this one. Now I will be making a detailed guide on how to move your ants, but basically you need to put the test tube into the out world section and then shine a heat lamp or something else that'll give them a lot of light and a lot of heat, which they don't like. And then cover up the part of the nest that you actually want them to move into. And then with that covered and moist and their test tube dry and like hot, then they'll probably move into the form of carry on. Now this form of carry on is actually a little bit too big for this colony. And this is a colony of around 20 Campanonus carpenter ants. So basically they really don't need too much space. If you're in doubt, go with the smaller form of carry on. It's actually like usually better in my opinion, because like as you can see, because there's too much room, they've used the bottom two chambers as garbage dumps. And that's always a pain to remove. The advantage of this setup is that it looks really nice. It looks like very good like on a table as a decoration, but this advantage is that it costs a lot of money. Like this setup costs me around $60 plus shipping from tarryo ants. So there is another option. Basically you can take one of those plastic bins as you find a dollar stores and just put the tube in that and use the, let them live in the tube. Like the tube will be their chamber where they live and have their brood, etc. And you just put the food in the out world, which is the plastic bin. Now, you know, these plastic bins are like two bucks at dollar store. They're very cheap. And while they look very ugly and the lid doesn't work that well, they still like, they're perfectly fine to keep ants in. So you just have to unplug the cotton and let the ants live in the tube and forge around in the out world. And the best part about the setup is that as the colony gets bigger, you can just keep adding more and more test tube setups. And you know, like for example, if this colony gets to around a thousand workers, I can have, you know, seven, eight test tubes in there for them to live in. And if the colony gets so big that like it's impossible to house them, because there will be no space for them to forage, like it will just all be test tubes, you can just attach this plastic bin to a second plastic tub and use that one as, you know, out world. And this one has a living quarters and just stack a bunch of test tubes in there. Now to secure the test tubes, you stop from rolling around. What I use is a clay, like modeling clay. Now, like clay has been used by many ant keepers that I know and it's perfectly safe for your ants. They will, like they might dig into a little bit. So don't put too much but just a little bit like underneath the test tube, well secured in place. Now let's talk about preventing escapes, which is very important if it's a setup that you're making yourself. Now, first of all, you need to provide them with ventilation. So what you can do is you can cut a square like I did in the lid and then use a very fine, very very fine mesh like that and just put two layers of it and super glue it on. Now this usually works unless you have very, very small ants and you don't even want to risk it with mesh. What you can do is you can just tap a bunch of holes into the top with a thumb tack and make sure the holes are very small and don't need that much ventilation and just put a bunch like small holes and it's basically impossible for ants to escape. Now there are some species of ants that are just complete escape artists like Laceus and also Solenobsis and many others too. And basically they're all small ants and they climb up surfaces super easily and what they can do is they can just maybe, maybe, fit through the hole on top. So what you want to do with these is you want to second layer of protection. For example, you can use olive oil for some species but for the species that really are good at climbing, you're going to need flue on which is also called liquid PTFE and it's a chemical that stops insects from climbing up and this is basically foolproof if you apply it on both the lid and the container itself. So if you just apply it on the walls of the container, there's a small chance that your ants will be such escape artists that will actually climb up all the way to like the lid and they'll like still squeeze through the gaps. I mean, it's a small chance but why risk it, right? So what I do is I also put some of the flue on on the lid like under it and it's literally impossible for them to climb upside down on the lid if there's flue on. Now flue on is actually pretty hard to find but you can probably order online from a number of different stores. I'll put a few links in the description to those stores and basically it is a bit pricey but just a small bottle will last you a long time. You'll probably need to like replace it once a month and when you replace it, just wash all of it off and then redo it. Don't just add another layer on top because over time, they'll stop working because there'll be some parts that just stick out and become too rough. So yeah, you need to wash off all the old flue on. Let's try it up. Alright, thanks guys. That's it for this video. Hopefully now that you've seen this video, you can you know how to house your ant colonies cheaply without spending too much money on professional form of carrier. And yeah, thanks for watching. Hope you subscribe. Bye!