I Am the Swarm

In addition to these accidental farts, there are so many new bugs born every day.

And now the site is very large, and the bugs are busy working day and night. It's not like it used to be, just hundreds of bugs, nesting together every night. When Luo Wen is free, he can count how many bugs there are in a while.

He feels a little bit that the old days are gone forever, and now he can only roughly estimate that the number of bugs is at least 50,000 or more.

As time passed, Luo Wen had some headaches these two days because many bugs were sick.

I don't know when it started, some white spots appeared on the original bright exoskeleton armor of the bugs.

At the beginning, there were relatively few, and the scattered squads were scattered on the carapace and other parts of several bugs. But within a very short period of time, these white spots spread rapidly, densely covering the insects' bodies, and shortly thereafter, these insects died inexplicably.

The dead bugs will be processed by the worker ants to recover protein according to the procedure, so these white spots are also transmitted to other bugs during the treatment process.

These white spots spread like a plague among the bugs.

When Rowan finally found out and paid attention, the number of dead bugs because of these white spots had reached hundreds.

Luo Wen blamed himself a little, it was his management negligence.

He's been busy looking at the scenery alone on the trunk of a tree recently, and since his size is getting bigger and bigger, he hasn't lived with the bugs for a long time.

Because of his size, a huge tunnel needs to be dug to go underground. And this will bring some unknown dangers to the nest, such as rain.

The entrance of the insect nest is a mound higher than the surrounding area. With the later construction of the worker ants, the position of the hole continues to rise, like a small crater.

In this way, when it rains, the worker ants will quickly block the entrance of the cave, so that the rain will not directly pour into the cave, and the accumulated water will not overflow the entrance of the cave.

However, if a passage that can accommodate Rowan is built, then with the size of worker ants, it is difficult to block the entrance in a short period of time. If the rain is too heavy, it will cause unnecessary trouble to the nest.

With Luo Wen's only experience as a worm, he naturally wouldn't have thought of this in advance.

Dozens of days ago, a heavy rainstorm enveloped this area. Fortunately, his body was not as big as it is now, and the passageway was not too big.

Just like this, many worker ants were drowned by the pouring rainwater.

Since then, Rowan has dug a new bedroom next to the worm's nest and lived alone.

And this is the main reason why he did not discover the white spot disease in time.

After realizing the white spot disease, Luo Wen carefully observed a sick worker ant, and found that the white spot was not some kind of disease, but a very small bug.

These bugs cling tightly to the host, bite the host with their mouthparts, live by sucking the host's body fluids, and reproduce rapidly. When their number reaches a certain level, it is enough to kill the host.

Although the cause of the bugs' illness was found out, Rowan didn't have a good solution for it.

The bugs' weapons tend to open and close, and they pose no threat to such a small white bug. The sticky hairs on Rowan's feet and feet can stick to these little white bugs, but in the face of thousands of infected bugs, he alone can't cure a few of them if he is exhausted.

Rehatch some bugs with sticky hairs? It takes a long time for the eggs to become adults, and when they grow up, the infected insects are probably dead. The efficiency of letting the brood directly produce adults is too low, and the number is too small to have any effect.

Rowan can only isolate the infected bugs first, and then think of a solution.

Just when he was thinking about it until his head exploded, things suddenly turned around.

He thought that the formic acid solution of worker ants is very powerful, and it is very lethal when facing opponents without acid-resistant genes. So, I made an attempt.

The test results were surprisingly good. These white worms had no anti-acid properties and were easily killed by the formic acid solution.

So, after an acid rain, the bugs regained their health.

But the root cause of this matter has not been resolved, that is how these little white bugs appeared.

In view of the fact that life is very monotonous nowadays, Luo Wen stroked his train of thought for a while, and came up with some guesses.

He has swept away more than 20 ant nests, and he has never seen such small white bugs on ants. Before that, these things did not appear in the insect nest.

Then it means that some recent changes in the worm nest have caused the proliferation of little white worms.

Rowan thought of the wood chips in the ant nest to prevent the cave from being damp. These wood chips are specially gnawed by the ants to cut off the roots of the vegetation, make dead wood, and drill out from above.

There used to be these things in the worm nest, but since Rowan moved out, the moisture-proof work in the worm nest has been a little negligent. This is the only thing he can think of that is different from the previous changes in the worm nest recently.

As for whether this is the reason, it will take some time to observe.

Soon, some orders were conveyed.

After the worker ants washed the entire nest with formic acid, they collected a lot of dry sawdust from the dead wood and transported it back to the nest. After some arrangement, the insect nest was as dry and comfortable as before.

In the past few days, the "white spots" did not appear again, and it seems that the problem is indeed caused by the dampness of the cave.

The problem was solved, and life returned to a calm state.

A few months later, the sphere of influence of the worm's nest was once again flattened out by about 100 meters.

Meanwhile, Rowan faced a new problem.

This question is actually an old one.

At the beginning, Luo Wen decided to go out of the ground, clear the ant nest, and land on the surface because the smuggling passage was too long, and the harvest and consumption of the worker ants back and forth were not directly proportional.

Therefore, as a last resort, the survival mode of the insect nest has changed from a support mode to a self-reliance mode.

But that problem was not fundamentally resolved at the beginning, and now, this problem has reappeared.

With the expansion of the territory, the edge of the territory is already close to 500 meters away from the insect nest.

It takes too long for worker ants to go back and forth, and it also consumes a lot of energy.

This distance is already the limit distance they can work.

If the nest will continue to expand outward in the future, this problem must be solved.

As a result, the original plan to relocate the insect nest was revealed again.

However, unlike before, the insect nest was hidden deep underground, surrounded by ant nests, and the difficulty and risk of migrating was too high.

But now, the insect nest is already the overlord of this area, and it can migrate from the surface without any risk, and the difficulty is not too high.

After the plan was finalized, Luo Wen, who was idle and had nothing to do, immediately started site selection.

In the end, considering all aspects, the location of the new insect nest was selected to be about 50 meters away from the border.

There is a safe buffer for a certain distance here, and it can be used as a foundation to push outward and expand outward in the future.

However, even so, this problem was only temporarily solved, and after advancing four to five hundred meters, Rowan had to face this problem again.

At that time, the problem cannot be solved by simply relocating the nest.

He must use this time to come up with a practical solution to completely solve this problem.