Posted December 27, 2018
During our November field trip to Parque Nacional Yaxha Nakum Naranjo (Peten, Guatemala) the park ranger who assists the FLAAR Mesoamerica team showed us three ant nests up in the two adjacent (but different species) of trees along Blom Sacbe (halfway to Grupo Maler). Since these nests looked like wasp nests my first estimate was that perhaps the ants had invaded and driven out the wasps?
Since these ant nests are up in trees it was not possible in November to get the camera high enough to photograph the nest straight-on. So I bought a new much taller Gitzo tripod (over 3 meters tall) and we bought a tall ladder to Yaxha for our late December field trip.
While at Yaxha this week before Christmas the park ranger (Teco) found several more nests: all had ants and I now believe these are original ant nests and not taken over from wasps. In about 50% of these ant nests stingless bees have built their hives inside the ant nest. There seems to be no overt animosity between these two insects in the nests, so we need to learn whether this is a symbiotic relationship, or some other phenomenon of nature.
The two arboreal ant nests at the left were found by Teco (Moises Daniel Perez Diaz), park ranger. Nicholas Hellmuth found the one in the Spanish Moss (in front of the IDAEH camp kitchen).
I took about 30 to 80 photographs of each ant nest. Maria Alejandra Gutierrez did macro-photos of several of the nests as well. We will publish all these photos in a FLAAR report on arboreal ant nests at Parque Nacional Yaxha Nakum Naranjo.
We also found independent bee hives and several very active and very fierce-stinging wasp nests this week. So lots to learn about at Yaxha.
