Hello, I just joined and only have just started the ant keeping hobby.
I've loved ants since I was a kid (like under 10 years) and use to argue with other kids that didn't know that winged ants were both males and young queens. I remember this one time I got so frustrated I yelled at a kid to go read a book! lol Back then I even tried starting my own colony but didn't know how. I would collect newly mated queens and put them in a small tank with dirt and waited with no luck. I knew my local queens fasted but I didn't understand the water issue back then. I even became obsessed with the old Sim Ant game. haha But continued failures discouraged me and back then I didn't know ant keeping was a "real hobby" outside of queenless ant farms so my little obsession became more a "oh look, an ant, they cool".
Fast forward and I am now in my 30s. I had discovered some Ant Hobbyists a couple of years ago on YouTube and occasionally watched them, so when I discovered a Fire Ant queen wandering the walk way at work on my way to my car I figured... hey, why not try again? So, taking advice from some YouTube Ant-ers I put her in a Test Tube setup and a day after she started laying eggs! My excitement was boundless after all these years. lol But sadly, I learned about exactly when queens have their flights and now I may have over done it. Is 34 queens too many? I mean, they're invasive so it's not like I'm hurting the environment from removing them... I was just going to take maybe 5-ish in case my first girl didn't survive but... Maybe someone would be willing to trade for some other local species because I would reeeally love some real Florida Natives.
I also have another species that soon I will be posting in the ID thread. I wasn't planning on taking an already established colony but my father found them between some old plywood and called me to collect them if I wanted because he was going to spray them to death. I was lucky enough to catch what looked like an egg laying queen and gathered a few minor and major workers, some brood and a few alates (which was probably a bad idea). I guess we'll see if the queen is actually laying in a few months when the current workers get old and die. They seem happy enough and recently enjoyed a mealy worm I gave them. I learned they kinda like honey, tomatoes, pure peanut butter, and flies but don't care for pear.
I am very much looking forward to raising some queens and been doing a lot of research for making formicarium nests and foraging areas. I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for collecting so many queens but truthfully I didn't think they were going to do this well. I guess they are fire ants after all, at least I had a lot of experience with getting bit as a kid.
My far in the future dream is to have a Colobopsis Impressa colony! They are so ugly and cool, I love them! And a Florida Native from what I read but are a supposedly nocturnal species so probably going to be harder to find a mated queen. And I wouldn't mind Pogonomyrmex Badius or Florida Harvester Ant, I remember collecting workers as a kid and they're pretty big! I guess for now I'll just work hard in learning how to care for ants with my hoard of Fire Ant queens.
Any advise or suggestions are welcomed! I want to make sure my girls do well.
And I'm not 100% sure they are Solenopsis invicta, maybe 99% sure because of how easy it was to find them. I don't want to kill off our native fire ant if I got lucky enough to catch those. But if I do decide not to keep them or give them to another ant-fan I will be sure to carefully check their species before releasing or killing them.
