Recently in Ant queens Category

Hi there,

Thanks for your wonderful website and blog! The worker harvester ants that are usually sold for small home ant farms only live perhaps a few months, often only a few weeks! What species of ant would you recommed if I wanted to have worker ants that easily live perhaps a year or longer?

thanks,
keith
*****
Dear Keith,

We are glad to hear you are interested in keeping live ants! We are often asked about which ants to keep in ant farms, how to make your own ant farm, and how to find ants that live longer than the ones sent through the mail.

They only way to insure your ants will live long is to have a colony with a queen. It is illegal to mail queens, which is why most companies that provide live ants to not offer this service. You can also read more about this here. The best way around this is to collect your own colony of ants from nearby.

We have several previous posts that will help with this:

You can read more about collecting your own ant colony on these posts:
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2011/10/how-to-find-an-ant-queen-austin-arizona.html
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2011/07/questions-on-ant-farm-steve-winnipeg-manitoba-canada.html
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2010/07/how-do-you-collect-an-entire-ant-colony-evan-philadelphia-pa-usa.html
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/ask-an-ant-expert/ant-farms/

For tips and instructions to make your own ant farm see these posts:
- http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2010/04/how-to-make-an-ant-farm-john-leeds-uk-moving-to-us-soon.html

Best of luck and enjoy the ants!
Corrie Moreau & the AntAsk Team

Hi,
I want to make an ant farm from a small aquarium I bought, but I need an ant queen. I don't want to dig up an existing colony. Would having a queen overpopulate the colony? How would I find a queen after its mating flight? I live in Arizona and it's October. I've heard that you need to look for a small hole with a small pile of dirt by it. I haven't seen any. Will ants make a larvae turn into a queen if there is no queen present like bees do? What time is mating season for ants in Arizona? Should I wait until mating season starts? -Austin

Hi Austin!

Thanks for contacting us! Digging up a colony to find the queen can sometimes be very hard. Often, the queen is hidden very deep in the soil and you might not find her. It might be easier to wait until next season for a newly mated queen.

James Trager has shared his expertise on the times when to expect newly mated queens of some ant species that are encountered in Arizona and are fun to keep in a formicarium. Here is his advice:

"Pogonomyrmex and Myrmecocystus flights are tied to rains, either monsoon, or spring, depending on the species.

Higher altitude, forest species of Camponotus fly on the first really warm days of spring, typically in April, May. Lower altitude species of oak-conifer woodlands, mesquite scrubland and true desert mostly fly with the first monsoon rains.

Finally, Formica species fly in July, especially early in the month, except the really high altitude ones, which may wait till August."

Here you can find more information on the ants of Arizona.

A queen would not overpopulate a colony. It is usually a good idea to have a queen, so that your ant colony lives past two month. The workers often die after this short time period and a queen would always supply new workers. Some of the larvae will turn into new queens, but they need to mate before they can lay fertilized eggs. It is very hard and often impossible to have ants mate in captivity. So it is best to find a freshly mated queen. You should keep your eyes open for several winged ant queens and keep one individual each in a small container. If one starts laying eggs, you can carefully transfer her to the bigger aquarium.

Here , here , and here are some other posts that might be helpful for you.

Good luck with your ant farm!

James Trager, Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

Hi!

I'm writing from Brazil to as what's the matter with my queen ant. She is an Odontomachus, I'm not sure of what specie, and I have had her for 2 months. She has laid several times but none of the eggs hatched; she keep growing a ball of eggs but no larvae appeared. I gave her some bugs and honey and she has eaten, so I believe she's well-fed. Is this normal? Will the eggs hatch? Is there some problem?

Thank you in advance,

Best regards,
Isabel

Hi Isabel,

I'm sorry to hear that your Odontomachus queen is not doing so well. Odontomachus are amazing ants and it would be a lot of fun to have a colony of them. It is a good sign that your queen has laid eggs but that does not necessarily mean that they will grow into adult ants. As discussed here, most queens are too weak to start new colonies. I would suggest continuing to feed your queen and be sure to provide her with a moist and protected habitat (you can check out some of these posts on keeping ants). In the end, it may require collecting a lot of queens before you are able to raise a successful colony.

Good luck!
Ben Rubin & the AntAsk Team

Hi Antweb,

I am a PhD student in Synthetic Biology and I've read that you talked about artificial insemination trials in ants, which have not be very successful. Would you mind giving me the references of the papers talking about that?

Best,
Xavier

Hi Xavier,

Thanks for your question! As you have read in this post on "How to breed ants", artificial insemination in ants has not been very successful and only been tested on very few species. Cupp et al. (1973) conducted an experiment in which the authors decapitated males. Queens were anesthetized with CO2, and stroked against the males to induce ejaculation. This experiment was done using fire ants (Solenopsis invicta). Read here to find out more about the red imported fire ant.

In a study by Bell et al. (1983) instrumental insemination was conducted, also using the fire ant Solenopsis invicta. Virgin queens were induced to fly, anesthetized with CO2 and inseminated with either a mixture of sperm extracted from the male seminal vesicles and accessory gland contents or sperm alone. Of the females we artificially inseminated 65% produced workers. Artificial insemination techniques have also been carried out using Atta leaf-cutter ants (den Boer et al. 2010).

A recent review article on the copulation biology of ants has been published by Boris Baer (2011) in the journal Myrmecological News. Here is a link to the pdf. In this paper, some more references to studies conducting artificial insemination in honey bees and bumble bees are given.

All the best,
Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

References

Ball DE, Mirenda JT, Sorensen AA & Vinson SB (1983) Instrumental insemination of the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 33: 195-202.

Baer, B (2011) The copulation biology of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Myrmecological News 14: 55-68.

Cupp EW, O'Neal J, Kearney G, Markin GP, (1973) Forced copulation of imported fire ant reproductives. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 66:743-745.

den Boer SPA, Baer B, Boomsma JJ (2010) Seminal fluid mediates ejaculate competition in social insects. Science 327: 1506-1509.

Hi,

I live in mid west Indiana I found this ant queen under a rock. I found her in my yard in town under a rock behind my house. There is an old oak tree in my neighbor yard but I examined the tree and found no ants. However, oaks are common in the town. I live in a small town 20 min south of Terre haute Indiana, near the Wabash river so not far from Illinois. Can you tell me what species she belongs to? I think she may be of the genus Camponotus. I have included pictures. She has already started to lay eggs.

Thanks,
Kris

Hi Kris,

We have deferred your question to James Trager, who has been of invaluable help with ant identifications for this blog. He thinks this is Camponotus castaneus, so you were correct with your assumption that it belongs to the genus Camponotus. James is Antweb's curator for Illinois and Missouri. In his experience, this ant species "is a denizen of upland forests, with a variety of dominant tree species, almost always with lots of oaks." Thanks very much for providing such detailed macrohabitat information.

Thanks for your question,
James Trager (guest expert), Steffi Kautz and the AntAsk Team

I have a Lasius niger queen and she is mated, have had her for around 2 months now and she has laid several times, but each time the lava go black and never hatch. I think this is because they are not being fed. I have put some small dead bugs in the tank with her but she doesn't leave her little tunnel to ever get to them so I am constantly removing them and adding new ones in hope she will get them to sustain the brood. If I were to collect some ants from my garden (making sure they were also Lasius niger) and put them in with her would they kill her because they were from a different colony?

Please advise.

Best regards,
Tom

Hi Tom,

My suggestion is to interfere as little as possible. It is normal that queens do not take up any food during the initial founding phase. They use the energy from the decomposition of wing muscle tissue to feed the first round of larvae and these will always turn into small workers. Sometimes they lay so-called trophic eggs, which serve to feed the larvae. However, it is quite likely that a queen does not have the strength to make it through the initial founding phase of a colony. For this reason, colonies produce thousands of queen. This increases the likelihood that one will eventually make it. And this would be my advice: try to get several queens and hopefully one or a few will make it.

You are right that workers from different colonies will most likely kill the queen.

Hope this helps!
Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

How long do ants live? Honey Bees can make a Queen from any new Larvae - can Ants?

Dear Nevin,

Depending on the species, worker ants can live anywhere from just a few months to a few years but queen ants can live much longer. Queens of the harvester ant species Pogonomyrmex owyheei may live as long as 30 years (Porter and Jorgensen 1988)! Most queens probably live just one or a few years though, again depending on species.

Much like honey bees, most ant species can theoretically influence any female egg to develop into a queen using a number of different kinds of stimuli. Feeding larvae well enough to reach a certain size by a particular age as well as endowing eggs with large amounts of yolk can both push ants towards developing into queens. Temperature can also influence the development of eggs. Some species tend to develop into queens if reared closer to the optimal temperature for larval growth and other species require a period of chilled overwintering to develop into queens. Just like in all social insects, the mere presence of a queen may prevent additional queens from developing though as a colony's queen ages, the worker ants are likely to produce more and more queens.

However, a few species of ants have a genetic system of caste determination and are not able to produce queens from any female egg. Eggs of these species (Pogonomyrmex barbatus and P. rugosus) are predetermined to be workers or queens by the version of a particular gene that they have. Queens have to be sure to mate with at least one male with each version of the gene or they will be unable to produce both workers and queens. This type of caste determination is incredibly rare and its discovery has led to a lot of research but we still don't know exactly how or why it evolved.

Ben Rubin & the AntAsk Team

Hello!

I live in Northwest Arkansas, United States. We have been observing an odd behavior - large black ants traveling in groups of maybe 12-24 individuals. They are in roaming "packs" rather than walking in narrow trails.

My best guess is that they are black carpenter ant workers - they are probably about 9 to 11 mm long, have very large heads and mandibles, and cream colored hairs on their abdomens. There is some difference in size and proportion within the packs - some have huge square heads, and some look more "normal."

So, are they patrolling for food? Trying to set up new colonies? (It has been an extremely rainy season and there is a lot of dead wood from an ice storm two or three years ago.) Something else? Why the loose, round packs rather than single-file lines?

The attached image is of one that a pack killed (or rather, tortured by two ants holding its middle legs and pulling them taut while others bit its head for several minutes, then dragged a foot to the side and left for dead). I assume that it was territorial behavior within the same species--do you think so? That is the only time I've observed an "execution" by a pack.

Would love to hear your expertise on the matter!

Hi!

Thanks for contacting us at AntAsk! We asked another ant expert, James Trager, for some help with this and here is what he had to say:

"The picture, sadly, does not help me. It looks vaguely like a mutillid or perhaps a Polyergus queen, rather than a conspecific of the pack-roaming ants as the writer suggests. The message strongly suggests Camponotus pennsylvanicus to me. They do sometimes recruit in (but usually linear) groups, but this roaming pack behavior sounds unusual, as the writer evidently recognized. I'd like to see it, and could probably interpret it better if so. If it were recruitment to a new nest site, I would expect them to be carrying brood, but there is no mention of that, so I can only guess that they are recruiting to a rich food source, such as a tree full of honeydew-secreting insects."

As James pointed out, it is impossible to tell what species of ant is in the picture as it is of poor quality. As he has mentioned, it could be a mutillid. Click here to find out more about these wasps that are sometimes mistaken for ants.

All the best,
James Trager (guest expert), Steffi Kautz & the AntAsk Team

Hi! I really want to know if there is any chance to breed ants? Can I make the ants stronger over generations like cows, if I give them parents with good genes?
Example: Can I make Messor Barbarus queens head extra red or extra big?

Dear Johan,

This is a question that has bothered ant biologists for a long time. Unfortunately, it is actually quite difficult to breed ants. Ant males and queens will only mate after nuptial flights which occur under very specific environmental conditions that are difficult to identify and have been nearly impossible to duplicate in the lab. You can read about how to identify male and female ants in this blog post. Some attempts have been made to artificially inseminate ants but these have all had little success. Bees are relatively easy to artificially inseminate but these techniques have not carried over to ants. While it is theoretically possible to breed ants for particular traits such as color and size, the methods for doing so have not been developed.

Ben Rubin & the AntAsk Team

Need some help IDing this queen. Looks too large for the typical Texas fireant but is all red. Location is gulfcoast area. Seen black ants of similar size and wondering if maybe queens of the same type are just red. Thanks for the help on IDing. Ill try and get better pictures in if needed.

Dear MP,

Thank you for including a photo. This certainly helps with the identification. We asked another ant expert, Lloyd Davis, for some help with this since he is familiar with the ants of Texas. He believes this is Camponotus castaneus. You can see a close up photo here.

The black queens of similar size you also see are likely another species of Camponotus and not a color form of this species. You can learn more about the ants of Texas here.

Happy ant finding!
Lloyd Davis (guest expert), Corrie Moreau & the AntAsk Team