Without further ado, the protagonist begins to check the packet of information conveyed by the courier on how to raise beetles.

The protagonist's initial attempt to domesticate the beetle is abandoned at the theoretical stage due to several difficult problems to solve.

The first is the issue of eggs.

Beetle eggs are relatively difficult to find, they usually lay their eggs in dirt, rotten wood, and the eggs are not concentrated.

It is difficult to find enough eggs without digging a large area of soil. Large-scale ploughing is a time-consuming and laborious task, and even if there is a harvest, because many insects will lay their eggs in similar places, and neither the protagonist nor the big-headed ant know how to distinguish the right beetle eggs from them.

If you look for larvae after the eggs have hatched, the same is true for the larvae of the beetle, which are also worms, and it is difficult to distinguish them from other insect larvae.

And when the beetle breaks the pupae, it is easy to recognize in appearance, but for insects, a pupa means adulthood, many skills are innate, and the remaining skills will also be adapted to master in a short time after breaking the pupae.

If the found beetle has been pupae for a long time, it will be difficult to domesticate it. The best way to domesticate flies, for example, is to adapt them to the domesticated environment when they are larvae, and to be tainted with the scent of the domesticators. In this way, the domesticated object after the pupation will not reject the domesticator.

In this regard, there is no useful advice in the domestication information in the information packet, because this group already has a certain size of beetle livestock, which can rely on the breeding of domestic animals to meet the demand.

The protagonist thinks about it, and it seems that this fall, it would be a feasible option to send scouts to track down some target beetles, find their nesting sites, and then dig up the eggs and bring them back.

And the last time the protagonist wanted to domesticate a beetle was in spring and summer, and it was not yet the season for beetles to lay eggs, so he missed the opportunity.

In contrast, the collection of fly eggs is much simpler, as long as a large amount of rotten food is piled up in a suitable place on the surface, a large number of flies will naturally swarm from all corners and rush to feed and lay eggs on it. The ants only need to collect the eggs and maggots afterwards.

The second problem is food.

As mentioned earlier, stag beetles or unicorns feed on tree sap, nectar, and fruits. Because nectar and fruits are seasonal foods, they are difficult to eat and the supply is unstable. Therefore, if these two beetles are domesticated, the sap must be the main feed.

But there is such a thing as sap that ants cannot collect, and they cannot be kept fresh when collected, so they can only be stocked where there are trees.

However, stocking beetles requires a large number of ant hands, and a large number of free-range beetles can easily make a few trees die quickly due to insect infestation, and there must be a certain scale of forest forests to support more beetles.

The location of the big-headed ant kingdom and the paving ant barbarian kingdom, according to the protagonist's observation, is actually a mountain valley.

The river flows from the mountains to the west, carrying sediment in the valley to form a plain of valley. Then the great river flows out of the foothills of the low mountains to the east, leaving a large freshwater lake in the southeast of the valley.

This valley, in the protagonist's previous life, was about the size of one or two human villages, but in the ant world, it was already a vast world.

The plains on the north bank of the Great River are larger and are mainly occupied by paving ant barbarians, while the overlords of the southern bank plains are the big-headed ants. Many other races of ants are forced to survive in marginal hills, mountains, and swamps.

This mountain valley may not be densely populated by shallow soil and frequent wildfires, and most of the trees grow sporadically, or a few trees gather into patches, and only in the hills and mountains on the edge of the plains can there be large areas of concentrated and contiguous forests.

In other words, most of the territory of the big-headed ant kingdom does not have the conditions for large-scale breeding of beetles.

These colonies of big-headed ants, which provide beetle breeding methods, live in the woods at the foot of the mountain, and they don't have to worry about this problem.

The protagonist, on the other hand, can only barely think of the newly conquered southern hills, where the trees are more abundant and may be able to support many beetles.

The third problem is that the ants do not know how to take care of the beetles at all stages and how to domesticate them.

Fortunately, at this point, the information in the packet is detailed enough, even beyond the protagonist's expectations.

Let's take a look at this piece of information in the packet, the first part is the characteristics of the beetle at each stage and how to care for it.

The eggs are milky white or pale yellow, and the newly laid eggs are similar to rice grains, and will gradually expand into spherical shapes the size of mung bean grains as they develop, and the incubation process takes about 10 days when the temperature and humidity are suitable.

The newly hatched larvae are first-instar larvae, molt into second-instar larvae after about one month, and molt again into third-instar larvae after about one month. The third instar larval stage is the longest, 6-8 months, which will be lengthened and shortened with the change of growth environment temperature.

The larval weight peaks in the middle of the third instar, when it begins to decline in winter, and does not rise until the following year when the temperature warms, but it does not reach the peak level.

The larvae at the end of the third instar stop feeding, squeeze out an ellipsoidal chamber with their bodies in the soil, and reinforce the walls of the chamber with feces and secretions to form a pupal chamber. The pupal chamber of the unicorn fairy is upright or slightly sloping, while the pupal chamber of most beetles is close to horizontal.

After that, the larvae enter the pre-pupal stage in the pupal chamber, the body becomes shorter, the color turns yellow, the epidermis becomes wrinkled, and soon after molting, that is, pupata, the pupal is dark yellow, there is no movement, only the abdomen can writhe. They are to stay in this state until the beginning of spring.

Females prefer to lay their eggs in environments suitable for larvae, such as humus piles, where they burrow into it and press the soil tightly to create a slightly larger egg chamber than the egg, with a separate chamber for each egg. After laying eggs in humus for a period of time, the female unicorn will come out to forage for nutrients and stamina, and then continue to find a suitable place to lay eggs. In general, a female unicorn can lay 40-80 eggs in more than 2-3 months.

Once these eggs have been collected, they should be spread in a nest filled with humus or fermented plants, and then filled with the same food, but with care for ventilation. These foods can have a certain heat preservation effect.

After the eggs hatch, they can continue to be reared in the hatchery, and the food is still fermented or humus. However, this kind of food is also particularly easy to breed fungi, and the beetle larvae of this period are more afraid of these fungi and may even be engulfed in mycelium, requiring ant keepers to remove the mycelium in time to create a "bacteria-free" environment.