Keep Your Ants Illuminated
Many ant-keepers are familiar with the common sentiment in our hobby: Keep your ants' nest dark. However, while this can work fine, this is often not the best strategy for the ants. Over the years I've experimented with this and will share my findings here.
Freshly-caught or founding queens
This is about the only circumstance that keeping your ants covered, and in the dark, makes sense. Being kept in the light can often delay founding. Time is of the essence for claustral queens that have recently partaken in their nuptial flight. They only carry a certain amount of resources within their bodies when they leave their parental colony. Every minute they are not setup in their founding chambers, or for our queens their test tubes, reduces the probability they will found successfully and how many nanitics they will raise. So I choose to keep them in the dark. How sensitive queens are to light varies quite a lot across species but there's really no reason to keep your queen in the light. She's not doing much while rearing her first workers, anyways.
Once a queen has reared her first workers, that's when I move the colony into the light and uncovered 24/7. Over a surprisingly short period of time, ants in captivity can become desensitized to light in the nest. It's similar to how we become nose-blind to certain smells. It's difficult to scientifically prove something like this, so I cannot be certain, but I suspect that in the long-run your colonies are better off being desensitized to light. You need to illuminate your ants if you, the ant-keeper, wants to see them. So they're going to be exposed to light in the nest sooner or later. When they're desensitized to light, you checking on your ants isn't stressful or disruptive for them. It also allows you to observe your ants as much you want, which we always encourage :)
There can be drawbacks to keeping your colonies this way. It can make it harder to move your ants out of an old nest, since they're unbothered by the light. However, I would argue that the nest being dark shouldn't be an important nest-selection criteria for your ants. It should be the right humidity, temperature, etc.
