Carpenter Ant Colony Cast with Aluminum - Camponotus castaneus (Cast #110)

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.