An amazing aluminum cast is made of an ant colony built on the side of a large tree stump. This is the possibly the craziest cast I’ve ever attempted and definitely the most challenging. This is a field ant colony (species Formica pallidefulva) with a single entrance tunnel right up against a large oak stump. Around 22 lb of aluminum was melted and it ended up taking around 10 lb to fill the colony. I didn’t know how exactly how to go about getting the cast out but I knew 1) I can cut wood and 2) I can dig dirt. So, how hard can it be? Turns out, it can be really hard.

I started to dig and cut initially, before deciding that doing that was going to be too difficult. Then I tried burning for two days and that seemed way too slow. I was posting my progress to my Facebook page and someone suggested drilling holes to make vents in the wood to target certain pieces, which I tried. Then it occurred to me that if I drilled into a section of wood from two angles, I could be fairly sure I wasn’t cutting into the cast if I cut down the line of the drill holes. These ants don’t tunnel in wood and the colony is only in the dirt pockets, so if I’m drilling and I hit dirt then I know not to cut to that depth. I don’t show the drilling much in the video but I’m doing that before most cuts. That’s why you see so many holes in the wood.

I actually didn’t plan on keeping the cast in the wood until the very end, which is why I wasn’t worrying too much about the damage I was doing to it. All for the better though because it would have taken much longer and probably wouldn’t have turned out as cool if I had planned to keep it in the wood. Toward the end, when I’m cutting on the back side of the cast, I still didn’t know if there would be a piece of cast sticking out on that side, once I saw that it was all contained well within the wood, I decided to keep it in the wood.

The cast has two main sections: the piece that comes out of the front and a more hidden piece that runs straight down in a vertical void in the wood. I only discovered that second piece after washing it.

It took ten days from the pour for the cast to be removed from the ground, around 40 hours worth of work. Some of that time was setting up cameras and even more of it was me scratching my head though.

Figuring out the mounting was a major task for me. I settled on drilling 3/4” holes on three sides of the wood and inserting oak dowels, as close to horizontal as I could. Then I built the base so that it catches those oak dowels and the cast can sit upright and be stable.

The colony is around 20” deep and the weight of the aluminum is around 10 lb. The total weight of the wood and the cast was 38 lb last I checked (it’s still drying and getting lighter).

I wasn’t quite sure to what extent I should clean up the wood but I sanded it a little bit and tried to remove any splinters. I started to plug some of the holes but didn’t like how that was working so I just left them. I may do more work on it as it dries. I’m not too sure what’s going to happen as the wood dries and splits but I used Pentacryl to help preserve the wood and have taken other measures. We’ll see!

More pics of the cast at: https://www.anthillart.com/castings/121/

0:00 Intro: Stump and Colony View
0:09 Aluminum Pour
0:39 Starting to Dig
1:09 First Piece of Cast Uncovered
1:29 Starting to Vacuum
1:55 More Cast Uncovered
3:23 Cutting into the Top
4:31 Cutting Around the Upper Tunnel
5:56 Pulling with the Truck
6:38 Removing the Cast
7:11 Washing
7:42 Final View of the Cast/Display
7:58 Display and Stats

Part three of the three fire ant colony aluminum casting session. You may notice in some of the other videos, dirt is piled over the colony. This helps to prevent the aluminum from bursting through the side of the colony. You may have also noticed that this wasn’t done for the last few casts and they turned out alright. Well, it finally happened on this cast; the aluminum burst through the hill at 00:30. Luckily, it didn’t mess up the cast overall and I only missed a small portion of the above ground mound. The spilled aluminum started a small fire but no worries, there’s always a water hose close by when casting and the fire was promptly extinguished.

This is the last of a three part series.

Part 1 can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QANwRxvLoI
Part 2 can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BieGs92yPn4

This is Anthill Art Cast #119 and reached a depth of 11” (28 cm) and weighed 6.7 lb (3 kg). More pictures can be seen here: https://www.anthillart.com/castings/119/

0:00 Introduction
0:03 Hills and Finished Casts 1&2
0:11 Pouring
0:45 Digging
1:45 Removing the Cast
2:06 Washing
2:33 Initial Wash Finished
2:39 Finished Cast Display/Stats

Part two of the three fire ant colony aluminum casting session. This one produced lots of smoke during the cast which made it difficult for me to see. Like a true professional I persevered and finished the cast with perfection (other than spilling a little bit of aluminum). It turned out pretty nice! Part 3 coming soon.

This is Anthill Art Cast #118 and reached a depth of 12” (30 cm) and weighed 8.6 lb (3.9 kg). More pictures can be seen here: https://www.anthillart.com/castings/118/

This is Part 2 of a three-part series.

Part 1 can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QANwRxvLoI
Part 3 can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZC3yNTAexU

0:00 Intro
0:03 Hills and Finished Casts
0:15 Pouring
0:52 Digging
1:38 Cast Removal
2:04 Washing
2:40 Mostly Cleaned Cast
2:53 Finished Cast Display/Stats

In this video series I cast a cluster of three fire ant colonies with aluminum. This is the first cast of the three. I had expected these to be fairly small and was surprised by the size of all of them, especially this first one. To dig their colonies, the ants remove dirt while digging underground tunnels and use that dirt to build the surface mound. In general, larger fire ant colonies have larger surface mounds but this can be deceiving. Rain can wash away the dirt of the mound leaving a large colony with a smaller-than-expected mound.

This is Anthill Art Cast #117 and reached a depth of 14.5” (37 cm) and weighed 9.9 lb (4.5 kg). More pictures can be seen here: https://www.anthillart.com/castings/117/

This is the first of a three-part series.

Part 2 can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BieGs92yPn4
Part 3 can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZC3yNTAexU

0:00 Intro
0:15 Aluminum Pour
0:45 Digging
1:38 Removing the Cast
2:04 Washing
2:22 Cleaned Cast
2:34 Finished Cast Display/Stats

I melted about 24.6 lb of aluminum to cast this large fire ant colony; however, something went wrong and only about 4 lb went in before the aluminum backed up into the pour hole. I usually refer to these failed or partial casts and it can happen for multiple reasons. In this case, it hadn’t rained in quite a while and I think that the tunnel walls had become dry and crumbly, allowing dirt to fall away and block the tunnels. Even though the colony wasn’t completely filled, enough tunnels were filled that it made an interesting cast.

I usually don’t post videos of these partial/failed colony casts but I didn’t really want the footage to go to waste and thought the cast actually turned out pretty cool. I have been experimenting with powder coating recently so I thought it would add to the video to show that process. I don’t plan to powder coat many casts and can only do it to smaller ones for now due to the size of my lab oven. Since this cast was so small I thought it would be a good one to try powder coating.

After the pour I still had a massive amount of aluminum left in the crucible and the only other ant colony nearby was a carpenter ant colony. So, I casted that colony and the video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyaWIKwuoWI . I still had a lot of aluminum left and didn’t have many ingot molds so I spent quite a while making ingots that night.

Pics/info of the cast at https://www.anthillart.com/castings/109/

0:00 Inro
0:04 Pouring Aluminum
0:21 Digging
1:03 Washing
1:24 Powder Coating
1:59 Powder Coat Curing
2:23 Completed Cast

This fire ant colony was built partially around a dead log that was lying on the ground with about half of it buried below the natural ground surface. I had melted 31.1 lb for a larger cast nearby and had a decent amount leftover so I decided to use the excess to cast this smaller but potentially more interesting colony. The resulting cast has a very noticeable cylindrical cut-out area where the ants had built their colony tunnels around the log. It doesn’t appear as though they tunneled into the wood at all. The log was around 4 in (10 cm) in diameter.

I started digging on the log side of the cast (1:30) but quickly realized that the colony didn’t extend directly below the log and it would be better to start on the other side (2:17). In the end, it worked out well to have both sides dug out because the casted tunnels were tightly wrapped around the log and it gave me room to wiggle the cast free. I was starting to think I may have to get out the chainsaw. My digging strategy is usually to find the edge of the cast so that’s what I’m doing during the initial digging.

The finished cast (Anthill Art Cast #116) weighs 11.1 lb (5 kg), has a depth of 15 in (38 cm) and a maximum width of 11.5 in (29 cm).

Cast pictures and info: https://www.anthillart.com/castings/116/

0:00 Intro
0:11 Pouring the Aluminum
0:44 Uncovering the Hill
1:36 Digging for Tunnels
4:30 Removing Cast from the Ground
4:59 Washing the Cast
7:25 Initial Wash Done
7:51 Finished Cast Display/Stats

Casting a subterranean carpenter ant colony with molten aluminum. I haven’t done many casts of the colonies of this species and have only posted one video of these back in 2014. I started out planning to cast a fire ant colony and then using the leftover aluminum to cast this carpenter ant colony. The fire ant colony cast failed and I was left with way more aluminum than was needed for this colony, which only took about 3 lb. There were no other fire ant colonies in the area so I spent quite a bit of time pouring the remaining 20+ lb of aluminum into the few ingot molds I had available. It was getting pretty late into the night by the time I started digging so I was rushing and being sloppy with the digging and the filming. The attempted fire ant colony cast was for a university professor who wanted a few casts for research so I was a bit disappointed when that cast failed. All was not lost though, and I got a decent carpenter ant colony cast and a video worth posting.

I haven’t done many casts of the colonies of this species and have only posted one video of these back in 2014. My previous carpenter ant colony video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1GKcpN1gjo

You can see that each species has a distinct method in which they build their colonies and this seems to be the case with all of the species found in the area. This type of carpenter ant builds colonies with a small number of surface openings (two in this case) with a few long flat chambers every couple of inches.

These ants are from the species Camponotus castaneus. There is another type of of carpenter ant here that builds underground nests, Camponotus socius, which have colonies that are similar to these but still have noticeable structural differences. I don’t have a video of those yet but plan to do one in the future.

At the start of the video, when I started building up the pour funnel around the main colony entrance, I noticed there was a second colony opening (to the left in the video). You can’t see this in the video, but I decided to simply close off the second entrance by placing a leaf over the hole and covering it with dirt. This worked out well because as it turns out, the second opening was closely connected to the main opening so I didn’t miss any of the structure by not pouring into both entrances.

Colony Depth: 17 in (43 cm)
Maximum Width: 14 in (36 cm)
Weight: 2 lb (0.9 kg)

0:00 Intro
0:07 Building the Pour Funnel
0:15 Pouring Aluminum
0:33 Shovel Digging
0:55 Uncovering the Colony
2:15 Removing Cast from the Ground
2:30 Finished Cast Display/Stats

In this video, a cast is made of a fungus farming ant colony (Trachymyrmex septentrionalis) using an aluminum alloy. If you’ve seen my other videos, you may have noticed that each species of ant has a very distinct colony structure. Fire ant colonies have a dense network of tunnels with many small chambers whereas carpenter ants usually have a single tunnel leading to just a few large flat chambers. The fungus farming ant colonies have one of the most unique structures of all the colonies I’ve cast. These colonies have very large bulb-like chambers in which they actually farm fungus for food using plant matter as compost.

The colonies are easily identifiably here because they deposit the excavated dirt in a crescent-shaped mound a few inches from the colony entrance. There are a very large number of these colonies here. You could easily find 50 colonies per acre.

These colonies are very challenging to cast. They have very narrow (1/8 to 1/4” in diameter) tunnels leading to the large bulbs. During past attempts, the aluminum or zinc hardened in the tunnels before the chambers were filled. This time I used an aluminum alloy which maintains its temperature longer and has lower viscosity. That did the trick.

More pictures of this cast at: https://anthillart.com/castings/107/

00:00 Aluminum Pour
00:39 Shovel Digging
1:02 Trowel Digging
2:38 Cast Removed
3:16 Cast Display

A timelapse of a fire ant hill on a log being collapsed by rain and then being rebuilt by the ants, twice. The playback speed varies throughout the video but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of a few 100x normal speed. The audio is normal speed recordings I made during the timelapse.

This is an interesting fire ant colony, being built directly on top of a large rotten log. I don’t see them built like this very often so I had to get a timelapse of it. It’s not as dramatic of a collapse/rebuild as my last timelapse video but it turned out pretty cool.

I setup the camera taking pictures at fixed intervals and waited for the rain. Shortly after they rebuilt, more rain was on the way. So, I setup for a side view shot of the next rain (0:24). After they seemed to be done rebuilding the second time, I left the camera running night to keep shooting, thinking they may build some more. Sure enough, after dark they came back and built some more (0:40).

#timelapse #anthillart

This is an older fire ant colony casting video that was never posted. More colony casting videos were planned for late last year but the weather would not cooperate when I had time. I'll definitely be doing colony casts this year plus a few more ideas I've been working on.

Captions were added to the video to answer two common questions:

1) Why does the hill look like you just piled up dirt?

There is a layer of dirt placed on and around the hill to stabilize it and plug any holes. It doesn't happen often but occasionally aluminum will burst through the hill or come out of a foraging tunnel near the hill.

2) Why does the aluminum look like it's not moving?

The air cools the outer layer of the aluminum, forming a film. The aluminum is still flowing beneath the film.

About 19.3 lb of aluminum went into this fire ant hill and the finished cast is about 12" in height. More info/pics here: https://www.anthillart.com/castings/070/

00:00 Aluminum Pour
00:41 Digging
01:31 Removing the cast
01:53 Cleaned Cast