Keeping a queen ant temporarily

[jimbodw07]

Hello I have a question. I am planning to obtain some yellow meadow queen ants. Summer is approaching and we might have a good monsoon season ahead. I want to know how exactly do I keep the newly mated queens? I am planning to obtain several of them to make sure at least one queen is fertilized. I don't have enough space/tanks to house all the queen ants just to verify if at least one is fertile. Do I keep them in a test tube and see which ones produce eggs? Or do I have to place all the queens in separate tanks to see if they produce eggs. Many thanks!
Jim.

[Jenny]

Hi Jim,
Keeping them altogether will pose the question, which one is laying? Seperate test tubes for each queen will be better.

This is an underground dwelling species (L.flavus), so keep them in the dark. Along my front path and garden we have several nests, and they only appear (daytime) during July/August time when they open up the nests ready for the mating flights.

[Wood~Ant]

Lasius species are always monogynous in the wild, which means they only have one egg laying queen per nest.
I have found, from my own personal studies of both Lasius flavus (Yellow Meadow Ant) and Lasius niger (Common Black Garden Ant) that L. flavus will form a better bond between queens when founding their colonies, whereas L. niger queens will only co-operate together for a short time before they end up fighting, leading to the death of all but the very strongest queen.

In captivity, flavus queens will continue to stay together without fighting, even when they have workers present.
This does not mean that eventually you end up with a polygynous colony; just that they will be polygyn for a longer length of time than other Lasius species.

Try an experiment. Keep a few queens (2 or 3) together, and keep some others as single. You can always separate the groups later if you wish, as that way you may find the group of queens might lay more eggs together and form a larger colony than the single queens.

Remember these ants are basically underground foragers and prefer to be kept dark, so don't keep them in the light for too long when you wish to observe them, or use a red light as this doesn't affect them the same as normal daylight.

[jimbodw07]

Oh I see. Thanks Jenant and Wood Ant! lets how this season works out