Although the protagonist is well fed and drunk, he does not enjoy it like a true conqueror.

After he finds a newly organized dormitory to rest, as soon as he wakes up, Rambo Fei sends a soldier ant to deliver the information he wants, and then the protagonist puts into a new job.

After Rambo Fei entered the city, he was ordered by the protagonist to investigate the number of ants and the food and materials in the city. After a busy day yesterday and a whole night last night, Rambo Fei was able to report to the protagonist.

In terms of the number of ants, "Qingqiu City" has its own set of statistical methods, that is, let the male ants recruit a group of ants, and count the number of ants under their command with the organization of military squads and legions, and then get the total number.

This kind of statistics is conducive to the king's meeting to grasp the military resources of the nest, so it will be counted once a year after the beginning of spring, fully mobilizing all the male ants, which can be regarded as a kind of military organization drill.

Now the statistics in "Dongyang City" are counted after the beginning of the spring this year, and the data is still very new, Lan Bofei directly found a detained king in charge of relevant aspects, and got all the data.

After the beginning of spring, after the queen ant's birth, there were 120,000 adult ants in "Dongyang City", of which only 10,000 were soldier ants, a very low proportion, because a large number of elite soldiers and ants were drawn into the Northern Expeditionary Army.

The larvae, eggs and pupae are not counted, and the total number is estimated to be 10,000.

After the battle of "Sitong City" and yesterday's decisive battle in the wild, there were only a few soldiers left, and now the remaining number can only be thousands, and most of them are old, weak, sick and disabled. Worker ants also have some damage.

In other words, there are only about 100,000 ant mouths in "Qingqiu City" at present, which is nearly half of the nearly 200,000 ant mouths in its heyday. The stall that the protagonist took over was not very good, but because of this, he was able to take advantage of the loopholes.

The food stored in the nest is the most important material, and it is also closely related to the military. Originally, there was a special king in the main nest who was responsible for managing the grain stockpile, and according to the ant's statistical method, the current food stock in "Qingqiu City" was enough to maintain the consumption of all residents for about a month.

As for the specific type, quantity, and preservation of grain, there is no detailed information.

The protagonist sighs in his heart, such data is better than nothing. Fortunately, through the confession of the relevant king submitted by Lan Bofei, as well as his previous understanding when he lived in the main nest, the protagonist still has some useful information.

Although the main nest "Qingqiu City" has many ant mouths, it is limited to the movement speed of the ants, and the land that can be directly controlled is a circle with the nest as the center and the distance that the ants crawl for half a day as the radius.

The resources inside this circle are directly used by the nest, and the closer the area is to the nest, the higher the utilization rate. In particularly far places, the ants can only go back and forth, whether it is hunting and gathering, they can't catch up, and the utilization rate is naturally very low.

It is precisely because of this that the food supply capacity of any nest is limited, and most of the large head ant kingdom has a secondary nest between thousands and 10,000 ant populations, and only a particularly rich secondary nest can supply more than 10,000 ant populations.

However, as the main nest, "Qingqiu City" has gathered the most elite military forces and the most concentrated male ant leaders, with an antmouth of more than 100,000 all year round, and it is difficult to maintain this colony for a long time with conventional hunting and gathering.

If you look at a colony of ants of similar size, such as marching ants, they can only get enough food by constantly moving, and when they run out of one place, they move to another.

The most abundant of sedentary ants are "agricultural" ants such as leafcutter ants, which only need to collect agricultural raw materials to convert into food.

Naturally, the "Qingqiu City" can't move at will, and they don't know any agricultural technology, so they rely entirely on other ways to support consumption.

The first way is to transport grain from each secondary nest to the main nest.

Most secondary nests regularly provide food to the main nest depending on the distance, and the nearest nest may have to send a convoy every three or four days, and the far nest only once a month.

Only a few front-line fortresses like "Waterfront City" that are facing the invasion of the Paving Ant Barbarians can keep some more food, and even get extra food support from nearby nests.

But this is a costly way to replenish the food, and the ants have no means of transport or livestock, so they can only rely on the ant's large jaws to carry smaller grains.

Moreover, the transport team itself also consumed, a well-fed ant can only last for three days without eating, and the most remote secondary nest is also three or four days away from the main nest, these transport teams have to eat once or twice in the secondary nest along the way, which adds some additional burden to the secondary nest.

In fact, this is equivalent to the main nest is exploiting each secondary nest, some of the secondary nests can support 20,000 ant mouths, and now they have to control the ant mouths at about 10,000, because the excess food is handed over to the main nest.

The second solution to the food dilemma of the main nest "Qingqiu City" is to graze aphids in large numbers.

As mentioned earlier, grazing aphids is relatively stable compared to hunting and gathering, where yields are fixed or even reduced due to overutilization, and only requires additional labor to obtain more food with the help of aphids' superior reproductive ability.

Even if the marginal effect of increasing the number of aphids decreases, given the tolerance of vegetation, it is already a relatively safe food source.

However, there are inherent drawbacks to this approach. One is that the aphid honeydew cannot be preserved for the previous main nest because the ants do not have the capacity. Therefore, the ants use the method of drinking at any time to graze the aphids, and all the ants take turns to graze to ensure that everyone can fill their stomachs.

However, this is contrary to the system with a clear division of labor established by the protagonist in "Dongyang Castle".

Fortunately, the protagonist has solved this problem in "Dongyang Castle", and he is able to use the fire to burn pottery. Honeydew has a high sugar content, and after simple natural evaporation, you can get concentrated honeydew with a sugar content close to honey and a long shelf life, which can be mixed with water before eating later.

While more herds can be protected with labor, this is also limited by the ants' ability to move.

Aphid herds that are too far away from their nests may suffer heavy losses in the face of heavy rain because the ants have not had time to move them to safety.

And it is not a good thing that the ant diet of the main nest contains too much sugar like honeydew, which is not healthy as a staple food.

This kind of food embarrassment is the "big city disease" that the main nest "Qingqiu City" has been facing. After the protagonist conquers the main nest, he also faces the same problem and an even more serious situation.