I Am the Swarm

In a short time, tens of thousands of digging ants were first summoned and rushed to the construction site of the new insect nest.

Later, more than 20,000 worker ants were mobilized to take care of the logistics. They needed to transport food to ensure the daily needs of the digging ants.

At the same time, they also need to carry out some soil transfer work and post-reinforcement work of the cave.

In the past, Luo Wen took the lead in digging out the worm nests, but now he also has tens of thousands of younger brothers, and there is no need for him, the supreme commander, to do it himself.

Although there is nothing that can threaten the insect nest now, it still upholds Rowan's usual carefree style.

Three meters below the ground, the digging ants built a very spectacular group of caves, and this is just a fake insect nest used as a transfer station and a cover-up.

The real insect nest is three to four meters directly below the false insect nest. It is also composed of a stretch of caves. There is only one passage between it and the false insect nest. There are sediments at both ends of the passage, which can be buried and blocked at any time.

At the same time, a team of spy ants and digging ants is stationed here all the year round.

Their task is to bury the channel and arrange the induction pheromone when the enemy invades the fake nest, so as to ensure that the real nest will not be discovered by the enemy.

Luo Wen doesn't think it's an act of carelessness, it can only be said to be cautious.

He was guarding against the earthy ants on the cliff. If one day his brain cramped and he ran straight down the cliff without making a turn, then he would be the first to be hit.

Although the strength of the worm nest is no longer comparable, there is still an unimaginable gap from the army of yellow ants. There is no chance of winning if you fight head-on, and you should mainly hide when you encounter it.

If the green hills are left, there will be no firewood to burn, and sooner or later he, Luo Wen, will avenge his past, ahem.

Although the scale of the new nest is large, it was completed at an extremely fast speed with the concerted efforts of tens of thousands of worker ants of various types.

The old nest was about to be abandoned, so there was no need to have too many scruples. Luo Wen dug the hole himself, and with the help of the worker ants, he dragged the nest up.

The brood is tireless every day, devouring a large amount of food without sleep and converting it into energy.

Except for the production of some eggs, the rest of this energy is basically used for its own growth.

I didn't have any concept when I was underground, but I didn't know until it was moving. The brood had already grown much bigger than Rowan, and it had a chubby figure. Even the passage was expanded several times before it could barely pass through.

If Rowan is now the size of a plate, then the brood is like a big watermelon. The worker ants, which are less than the size of a fingernail, are like little ones around it.

Countless little ones crawled around it, and tens of thousands of worker ants piled up on top of each other at the bottom of the nest, forming a tray-like structure.

Then after constant adjustments, the tray gradually began to move.

Rowan didn't get involved. As the highest command and highest combat force of the worm nest, he was responsible for the handling command and security work.

Over the distance of several hundred meters, the worker ants went through several rotations, and finally moved the mother's nest to the new nest without any risk.

In the next few days, the main passage and the rooms of the hive underwent a round of widening work.

The brood finally moved into its new chamber.

Afterwards, the main channel was tightened again and returned to its previous appearance.

The move to the new nest was successful, but it was a pity that no one shared the joy with Luo Wen, but he had already gotten used to it and adapted to this life without communication.

The insect swarm has once again entered a flat development period, recuperating, advancing outward, destroying ant nests, digesting territory, and repeating itself.

After hundreds of days and nights, the swarm was once again reaching its limit of expansion.

As for how to solve this problem, Luo Wen already has an idea.

The method is to divide the base.

He had this idea a long time ago and has done many experiments.

In the beginning, he used the queen's gene as a template to try to hatch a few nest version of the queen.

These queens can grow normally from eggs to adults, but they will not lay eggs after they reach maturity.

Later, after several rounds of experiments, the result was still the same.

After Luo Wen thought hard, he still couldn't find the problem. Could it be that the ant queen produced by the brood was defective?

Luo Wen vaguely felt that this was not the problem, and began to look for answers by observing the ant nests.

He kept a colony of black ants in captivity, and killed the queen and most of the members. Reduce their size so that it is more convenient to observe the whole process of new queen ant birth, growth and egg laying.

This nest of black ants is not allowed to go out, and whenever a member of them wants to go out, they will be driven back by the soldier ants guarding outside the cave.

Every day, the workers in the nest transport food to the outside of the cave for the needs of the nest.

And Rowan dug a passage to connect to the ant nest, and blocked the entrance of the passage with his body.

His color-changing skills and pheromone skills allow him to confuse black ants in all directions. He is like a stone in the ant nest, and no black ants will be curious about him.

In order not to miss any details, he gave up hunting for food.

Every once in a while, many worker ants will also send his food through the channel. He only needs to turn around to eat food, and when he is full, turn his body back.

From the beginning to the end, his body has been blocking the entrance of the passage to prevent the black ants from escaping from here.

Rowan was ready for a long and protracted battle, but he didn't expect the answer to be obtained so quickly.

After the ant nest lost its queen, the worker ants did not know what method they used to re-hatch several queens from the eggs, as well as several ants that Luo Wen had never seen before.

When the queen matured, she did some indescribable things with those novelty ants.

Soon afterward, the novel ants died one by one, with none surviving.

Rowan stretched out his legs secretly, sticking away the corpses of these strange ants.

Then in the ant nest, several ant queens led their respective supporters to break out an internal war.

The failed queens were brutally killed, and their followers surrendered.

Until the end of the war, only one queen survived, and it reaped the allegiance of all the remaining ants.

Then the ant nest entered a familiar rhythm, laying eggs, nurturing larvae...

In fact, when the incident was halfway through, Luo Wen had already figured out the crux of the problem.

But he was really bored, so he watched the drama until the end, just to relieve his boredom.

Those novel ants should be male ants, and they will die shortly after that, so they usually only appear in the initial stage of the ant nest.

The ant nests that Rowan had been undercover at the beginning were all large ant nests with at least a few thousand members, so he had never seen male ants.

This is the crux of the problem that the queens hatched from the mother nest cannot lay eggs. They have not had any trouble with the male ants.