I wouldn't have believed it unless I photographed

[Honeydewman]

Guys I would not have thought it possible but we had in my area another flight of the Niger.

I captured one today and photographed it.

It is October is it not??





I have never seen them fly so late and had thought that all the Princesses had already flown.

I did let her go after the picture and she flew into the Sun. Hope she got all she needed..

[Wood~Ant]

Normally for October I would have said Lasius alienus are the only British ant specie to fly this late on in the year, but as Nottinghamshire is a bit far north and with the unusually hot spell we have had, it comes as no surprise that a few late nuptial flights are taking place; and she certainly looks like a niger queen, though to be honest both L. alienus and L. niger do look very similar so she could be either

[Honeydewman]

Good Morning Wood.

If they belonged to the Niger then it must mean that not all winged females or males leave the nest and that ultimately some are left behind. Had we not had the warm spell then they would not have flown.

Wonder to their fate if they had not flown....Death??







Unless of course Ants have an unrivalled ability in that they can predict the weather accurately longterm?

Maybe they have their own Mr Fish...

[Deleted]

I also saw a single wingless new niger queen wandering around the pavement in the north west.
I remember once back in the eighties(?) the weather was so bad over the summer that there was not a single day that any nuptial flights could take place - and in late October all the local colonies had piles of chopped up alates around the entrances of their nests. Obviously they had decided that they could not support them over the winter and they were all killed off with the onset of the cool autumn weather. Interestingly every single body had been chopped into three pieces and had their wings removed. Around some colonies there were so many bodies that they had formed small mounds of dead alates.

[Wood~Ant]

If the winged queen is Lasius alienus, then it is good news as it means that this species has moved about 70 miles further north over the past 25 years, as milder winters and global warming is helping many ant species to do.
The experts say that Fire Ants and other invasive species may be on the south coast of England by 2020, and many British ants are slowly but surely moving that little bit farther north every 10 years or so, so if this is correct we may well get some people finding ants they didn't have in their region before.

Of course the down side to this is that the more invasive the ant species, the more likely they are to kill off existing ants or other flora and fauna indigenous to that region.