Carpenter Ant Colony Cast with Aluminum - Camponotus castaneus (Cast #110)

Casting a subterranean carpenter ant colony with molten aluminum. I haven’t done many casts of the colonies of this species and have only posted one video of these back in 2014. I started out planning to cast a fire ant colony and then using the leftover aluminum to cast this carpenter ant colony. The fire ant colony cast failed and I was left with way more aluminum than was needed for this colony, which only took about 3 lb. There were no other fire ant colonies in the area so I spent quite a bit of time pouring the remaining 20+ lb of aluminum into the few ingot molds I had available. It was getting pretty late into the night by the time I started digging so I was rushing and being sloppy with the digging and the filming. The attempted fire ant colony cast was for a university professor who wanted a few casts for research so I was a bit disappointed when that cast failed. All was not lost though, and I got a decent carpenter ant colony cast and a video worth posting.

I haven’t done many casts of the colonies of this species and have only posted one video of these back in 2014. My previous carpenter ant colony video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1GKcpN1gjo

You can see that each species has a distinct method in which they build their colonies and this seems to be the case with all of the species found in the area. This type of carpenter ant builds colonies with a small number of surface openings (two in this case) with a few long flat chambers every couple of inches.

These ants are from the species Camponotus castaneus. There is another type of of carpenter ant here that builds underground nests, Camponotus socius, which have colonies that are similar to these but still have noticeable structural differences. I don’t have a video of those yet but plan to do one in the future.

At the start of the video, when I started building up the pour funnel around the main colony entrance, I noticed there was a second colony opening (to the left in the video). You can’t see this in the video, but I decided to simply close off the second entrance by placing a leaf over the hole and covering it with dirt. This worked out well because as it turns out, the second opening was closely connected to the main opening so I didn’t miss any of the structure by not pouring into both entrances.

Colony Depth: 17 in (43 cm)
Maximum Width: 14 in (36 cm)
Weight: 2 lb (0.9 kg)

0:00 Intro
0:07 Building the Pour Funnel
0:15 Pouring Aluminum
0:33 Shovel Digging
0:55 Uncovering the Colony
2:15 Removing Cast from the Ground
2:30 Finished Cast Display/Stats