I Am the Swarm

In addition to these careless burps, so many new bugs are 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, there are only hundreds of bugs, nesting together every night. When Rowan has nothing to do, he can count the number of bugs in a while.

He felt that the days of the past are gone forever, and now he can only roughly estimate that the number of bugs is at least 50,000.

Time passed, and Rowan had a headache these two days because many bugs were sick.

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

At the beginning, it was relatively small, and the classes were scattered in several parts such as the carapace of insects. However, within a short period of time, these white spots spread rapidly, and the whole body of insects was densely covered. Soon after, these insects died inexplicably.

The dead bugs will be processed by the worker ants to recycle the protein according to the procedure, so these white spots are also transmitted to other bugs along with the processing process.

These white spots spread among the bugs like a plague.

When Rowan finally found out and paid attention, hundreds of bugs had died because of these white spots.

Rowan blames himself a little, this is his management negligence.

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

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

The entrance to the worm's nest is a mound higher than the surrounding area. With the later construction of the worker ants, the position of the hole is constantly rising, like a small crater.

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

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

With Rowan's only experience as a bug, he naturally wouldn't have thought of this in advance.

A few days ago, a heavy rainstorm shrouded this area. Fortunately, his size was not as big as it is now, and the entrance was not too big.

Even so, many worker ants were drowned by the poured rainwater.

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

And this is also the main reason why he didn't discover white spot disease in time.

After discovering the white spot disease, Rowan carefully observed a sick worker ant, and found that the white spot was not a disease, but a very small insect.

These worms cling to the host tightly, bite the host with their mouthparts, live by sucking the host's body fluids, and reproduce rapidly. Waiting until their numbers reach a certain level 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 weapons of the bugs tend to open and close, making no threat to such tiny white bugs. The sticky hairs on Rowan's feet can stick to these little white bugs, but in the face of thousands of diseased bugs, he alone can't cure a few of them.

Re-hatching some sticky hairy bugs? It takes a long time for the eggs to reach the adult, and when they grow up, it is estimated that the infected insects are dead. It is too inefficient to let the mother nest directly produce adults, and the number is too small to have any effect.

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

Just when he thought so much that his head exploded, things suddenly took a turn for the better.

He thought that the formic acid solution of the worker ants is very powerful. When facing opponents without acid resistance genes, the lethality is very powerful. So, made the next attempt.

The test effect is surprisingly good, these white bugs have no anti-acid properties and are easily killed by 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 reason that life is very monotonous these days, Luo Wen thought about it a little, and then he had some guesses.

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

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

Rowan thought of the wood chips in the ant nest to prevent the burrow from getting wet. These wood chips are specially drilled by the ants to bite off the roots of vegetation to make dead wood.

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 somewhat negligent. This is the only change he can think of in the recent insect nest that is different from the previous one.

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

Soon, some orders were conveyed.

After the worker ants rinsed the entire nest with formic acid, they collected a lot of dry wood chips from dead wood and transported them back to the nest. After some arrangement, the nest is as dry and comfortable as before.

In the past few days, the "white spots" did not appear again. It seemed that the problem was indeed caused by the dampness of the cave.

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

A few months later, the sphere of influence of the Insect Nest once again spread out to about 100 meters.

Meanwhile, Rowan faced a new problem.

This question is actually an old one.

When Luo Wen decided to get out of the ground, UU reading www.uukanshu.com swept the ant nest. The reason for landing on the surface was that the smuggling channel was too long, and the workers ants went back and forth to harvest and consume.

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

But that problem was not fundamentally solved at the beginning, and now, this problem has appeared again.

With the expansion of the territory, the edge of the territory is nearly 500 meters away from the worm nest.

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

This distance is already the limit at which they can work.

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

So, the original plan to relocate the insect nest was turned over again.

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

But now, the worm's nest is already the overlord of this area, and it can be swaggeringly migrated from the surface. There is basically no risk, and the difficulty is not too high.

The plan was finalized, and Rowan, who was idle and had nothing to do, immediately started the site selection work.

In the end, considering various considerations, the address of the new worm 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 in the future.

However, even so, this problem has only been temporarily solved, and Rowan will have to face this problem again when he pushes out four or five hundred meters in the future.

By then, the problem will not be solved by migrating nests alone.

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

​​