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Ant nest question...are these eggs and why do ants do this?

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We found an ant nest...we think. lots of ants and they are carrying white things, when we exposed them they took the white things underground....were these eggs? Why are the eggs above ground? Also we have some ant killer that exterminators use....we spray them on a couple of ants we found weeks ago in hopes they would take it back to their nest...the next day there were tonnes of dead ants on the sidewalk,...we had no idea there were that many ants....why did this happen?

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Yes sounds like ant eggs. they take them to the top of the nest because the sun warms them up. just as a point of interest there are about a billion ants for ever human on this planet.
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ants have the same life cycles as butterflies ...eggs... larva...pupa (cocoon) and adult. You may of seen some eggs but what you were probably seeing was the larger larval stage, which is helpless and is cared for by adult ants and the pupa stages which the ants are encased changing into the adult ant. They are near the surface due to them getting warmed by the suns heat..if the brood needs to cool down they are moved below surface. Ant colonies can be made up of tens of thousands of ants...insecticides are usually very effective against insects...if you place the insecticide near where there is a lot of ant traffic you will effect many and they will die where others will now drag them out off the ant nest piling them up in great numbers.
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it was most likely the larva and maybe some eggs. the worker ants move them higher up so that the sun can warm them and they took them back down to protect them from you. when you sprayed the ant killer it most likely killed the ones that were high up and the others moved them out of the nest and that most likely caused the spray to affect the ones carrying the dead ones and they died on the outside too.

this website has pics of the stages so that you know what stage of ants you saw being carried around

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/TOOLS/ANTKEY/...
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