The next day, the wedding flight ceremony went as normal according to the protagonist's plan, and the ceremony began at sunrise.
The female ants did not have anything to do during the wedding flight ceremony. The protagonist allowed them to move around freely in the nest. They only had to wait for notification at dusk before gathering in the conference room.
Thirty-two male ants each left the nest with their own teams to hunt. They were free to choose their direction and hunting area. The formation of these teams is not neat, each has only four soldier ants and twenty worker ants. The other team members were left by the protagonist in "Dongyang City" to work on infrastructure.
According to the rules, these teams can go back and forth between the nest and the hunting ground multiple times before sunset in order to transport prey. The final evaluation is based on the cumulative amount of prey in one day. Each team can only hunt live prey, plant food and dead prey are not counted in the score.
In this way, the wedding flight ceremony actually becomes a competition, and there is only one referee, the protagonist himself. Such a setting that was obviously easy to operate as a black box did not arouse objections. The simple ants had no concept of deception at all.
The referee's main job is to count the number of prey, but the protagonist has no time to guard the entrance of the cave alone. He asked the secretary to help him with the counting work. This work required certain mathematical knowledge, but the secretary did not have this skill.
The protagonist knows that the male and female ants among the ants have basic mathematical concepts and knowledge. For example, male ants know how to allocate squads according to groups of fifty ants, and can also carry out complex legion organization and battle damage statistics; while female ants will lay a fixed number of ant eggs every day according to the requirements of the nest. From this point of view, the mathematical ability of ants is roughly equivalent to that of a human being in the first or second grade of elementary school. They can master the basic four arithmetic operations, which should be mastered through learning.
The protagonist did not have time to popularize mathematical knowledge to illiterate ants like Xiao Mi. He experimented and found that Xiao Mi could understand the mathematical concepts of one, two, three, four, five and six by counting his own joints and tentacles. This was enough.
So, the protagonist asked the worker ants to use branches to draw 4*8 squares on the black ground, a total of 32 squares, each square representing a male ant. Then the worker ants found a large amount of shiny white gravel from everywhere and piled it next to the grid.
The protagonist told the secretary that after each male ant team came back with prey, they would drop 1 to 5 white gravels on the grid corresponding to the male ants according to the size of the prey. 1 for small prey, 3 for medium prey, and 5 for large prey. The size of the prey is judged by the secretaries themselves, and ants also have this basic judgment. In this way, in the end, you only need to look at the total number of gravels in each grid to know the final score of each male ant.
So will Xiaomi confuse the corresponding relationship between the grid and the male ants? The answer is no. Ants have an amazingly good memory for their companions. As long as they come into contact with each other once, they can firmly remember each other for a lifetime. The protagonist asks Xiao Mi to arrange the grid according to the order in which she knows the male ants, so that there will be no confusion.
After leaving a secret guard at the entrance of the cave, the protagonist told her to inform him when the first few teams came back. He had to come over and take a look at the little secretary's counting work. It was always not very reassuring to do this work for the first time.
Then the protagonist took Hua Mulan and other ants back to the underground of "Dongyang City", and he wanted to carry out some construction in the nest.
Most of the remaining ant construction team went to the construction site of the combustion chamber. One hundred and twenty worker ants were left with the protagonist. He planned to build a separate house for each male and female ant.
The female ant becomes the queen after the nuptial flight ceremony. In each sub-nest, all queens live together. It is precisely because of this that due to genetic and traditional factors, these mixed queens always want to fight openly and covertly with other queens, which is no less exciting than the palace battle dramas of the Qing Dynasty. The final result is that only a small part of the queen ants in the secondary nest survive, and most of them either die or leave the nest with a small number of worker ants.
The protagonist will soon have twelve queen ants here. Although the protagonist has issued an order to prohibit internal fighting, such orders are short-term, and the protagonist cannot say what the long-term effects will be. The protagonist naturally does not want a large number of queen ants in "Dongyang City" to die from internal friction, so the best way is to let these queens live separately.
Under the guidance of Hua Mulan, the protagonist finds the ant queen's palace, which she has never been to before. The protagonist has never seen the queen ant while living in "Dongyang City", and this time he finally came to this place. The Queen Ant's palace is hidden in a remote corner away from the two-bedroom apartment where the protagonist originally lived, approximately to the south of the nest and deep underground in the nest. The queen's dormitory is surrounded by worker dormitories, incubators and nurseries.
The protagonist made some calculations and found that the original layout of the nest chamber here has been fixed. It is not easy to dig a new queen's palace. Even if the queens are dug well, they will be very close to each other, and it is still easy for trouble to arise. It is better to abandon the original queen ant palace and turn it into a granary or the like in the future.
The protagonist leads the worker ants to the deep southwest corner of the ant nest, which is close to a drainage channel. The humidity and temperature can meet the needs of the queen and ant eggs. Moreover, there is no built nest here, it is a completely blank sheet of paper that can be planned by the protagonist.
The protagonist quickly sent the information package he planned to the worker ants, who were responsible for the specific construction.
According to the protagonist's vision, the harem area where the queens live will occupy an entire underground plane. In the middle is a large incubation room and nursery room. There are several up and down passages in these nest rooms. In the future, all the queen ant eggs will be mixed together and hatched here, regardless of each other.
The incubation and nursery area is shaped like a circle, and twelve channels are dug out radially next to these circles, like a sun pattern. At the end of the passage is the dormitory of the queens, so that all the queens' residences are far away. In addition, the queens have difficulty moving when they enter production mode, and it is not easy to cause fights if they cannot see each other.
The ant queen's palace is designed with drainage channels, and there are also special small passages connecting the central area of "Dongyang City", so that the queen ants can escape in special situations.
The above is the entire plan of the harem area. It's sad to think about it. The other protagonists traveled back in time and opened harems, and those were all their own women. And when the protagonist has a harem, these twelve female ants are all other people's wives, and they have to build houses for them.
The protagonist leaves more than a hundred worker ants here for construction. Although there are many new nests that need to be built here, each one is not large in size. The protagonist estimates that it will be enough in half a day.
The protagonist has been staring at this construction site for a while. Since the workers are responsible for the specific construction, there are sometimes subjective deviations in the execution of the design information package. At this time, the protagonist will instruct Hua Mulan, who also received the information packet, to correct it, and Hua Mulan also completed the task very well.
Halfway through the project, a worker ant came to report that there was the first team returning with prey at the entrance of the nest.
The protagonist leaves Hua Mulan to continue supervising the work and walks out of the nest.
