Post by Wood~Ant on Aug 10, 2012 14:04:33 GMT
Jen and myself went up to our local supermarket, and when we were waiting for the bus back we saw lots of newly mated Lasius niger queens running about. Some were really large, and where we know a Formica fusca nest to be we saw a lots of activity with workers rushing excitedly around.
We hoped we might be lucky enough to see a few fusca queens, as with the awful wet and cold weather back in July, I wondered if the fusca were flying later than usual; but as Jen collected a few queens in her pot, they all turned out to be L. niger with not 1 fusca queen to be seen, either in the pot or on the ground.
The fusca workers were busy catching niger queens and dragging them off for food, so when they might have had their mating flights could even have been as early as late June, as July was a complete wash around here for flying ants of any species.
We hoped we might be lucky enough to see a few fusca queens, as with the awful wet and cold weather back in July, I wondered if the fusca were flying later than usual; but as Jen collected a few queens in her pot, they all turned out to be L. niger with not 1 fusca queen to be seen, either in the pot or on the ground.
The fusca workers were busy catching niger queens and dragging them off for food, so when they might have had their mating flights could even have been as early as late June, as July was a complete wash around here for flying ants of any species.
