54 replies to this topic

[dspdrew]

5-19-2013
 
I found these three Solenopsis molesta queens in Southern California, May 10th 2013, walking on a path next to some grassy dirt.
Original ID thread: http://antfarm.yuku.com/topic/15973





I found three of these queens, and they all started laying eggs about two days after I caught them. All three now have nice little piles of eggs.







A lot of people have been saying these are quite easy to raise, but Mrmacophyl seems to think otherwise. I guess I will find out soon enough.

[dspdrew]

Update 6-17-2013
 
Two of these queens now have their first workers, and they are TINY.

[dspdrew]

Update 7-20-2013

Ok, so I put all three test tubes together in a container and opened them up.



Right away they all started to mingle, and then a few of the workers started to grab each other and appear to be fighting. I put three termites in there for them, and the colony on the left which seemed to have slightly larger workers dragged all three of them into their tube.



I went to work, and when I got home, I found the colony on the left again, stealing all the brood from the colony next to them. Soon they had every last brood from that colony added to their brood pile. I also noticed a few of their workers harassing that colony's queen too. Small fights here and there were still breaking out amongst the workers. At this point I decided to remove the third colony (the one on the right), and keep it separate, since it hadn't been disturbed too much yet. I think they had a couple brood stolen from them, but that was it. A little later the second colony's queen was dead; the first colony's workers killed her.



After this, I noticed something interesting; all the workers stopped fighting and I never saw a fight happen again. Eventually all the ants from the first and second colony moved into the first colony's test tube, and at that point, I took them out of the container and put them back with the rest of my test tube colonies. Now I have two colonies of Solenopsis molesta, one small, and one much larger; not exactly what I was hoping to get out of this, but it's probably better that way, I have way too many colonies of ants as it is.

[dspdrew]

Update 8-21-2013

 

Both colonies are doing well and growing. Here's a short video of one of the colonies, and as you can see, they have a fairly large pile of brood.

 

[dspdrew]

Update 9-17-2013
 
Both colonies are doing well, and have a large amount of workers. One colony has a lot more workers than the other; I would estimate it has around 75 workers.
 
Here's a picture of today's feeding time.
 

[dspdrew]

Update 2-28-2014
 
The smaller of these two colonies I sold through the AntsCanada GAN program. The larger colony I still have and it's growing steadily. At this point, there's probably about 600 or so workers. I just recently gave them a fresh new test tube since their original one was all dried out. It took about a month, but they finally decided to move the whole colony over a few days ago.
 
Here's some pictures I took today.
 

 

 

 

[LAnt]

So are their tubes kept in the light?

[dspdrew]

Nope.

[dspdrew]

Update 6-2-2014
 
The colony is doing great, and I estimate about 1000 workers now. They're still living in the same test tube and container, and I just gave it a nice cleaning yesterday.

 

[Crystals]

Interesting that I don't see any climbing on the glass/acrylic.

Are you using anything to contain them?

[dspdrew]

No, just the lid. They don't seem to crawl up the sides all that much.

[Myrmicinae]

This is a very interesting species.  Unfortunately, my last S. molesta colony drowned during hibernation. 

[Gregory2455]

Is there any update? All my Solenopsis molesta queen's eggs never seem to develop, I am guessing they are infertile.

[Mercutia]

@Greg: Sometimes you can't see because it's so small. Just give it some time.

[Gregory2455]

Oh, It has been close to 4 months now, nothing but eggs, I did find them very close to their nest however so they may just have been wandering alates.

[dspdrew]

They're not fertile.

[Gregory2455]

That's what I meant.

[dspdrew]

Update 11-4-2014
 
The colony's test tube just flooded, killing the majority of their brood, and a lot of workers. There is still probably around 1000 workers though. The bottom of the container was just covered in them, all carrying brood around. They had one smaller pile of brood left, piled just inside the entrance of the test tube where it was a little more dry. On top of this pile I saw the queen still alive and well.

[Erik Kegge]

Sorry to hear about the flooding. Fortunately the Queen is alright. Interesting species. They look really tiny.

[dspdrew]

Yes, they're very small, so it doesn't take much to drown them.