# 23-25 hours
Me and my wife went looking together but again no luck. On the positive side, my wife is starting to become used to looking at insects xD
# 25-26 hours
I think I'm going to give up, it's been so long now. Woke up at 4 in the morning had an hour bike ride to the biggest park which is in a one hour radius from my house, and guess what ... not a single one again. The day before was rainy and that morning was very nice humid warm sunny a nice breeze, perfect I thought .... Well musquitos had another go at me, this time at both of my elbows … I don't know, but it feels like queen ants are avoiding me.
Lol! My GF isn't very outdoorsy, but I got her to come once. We found 4 Pogonomyrmex queens in founding chambers so I think that it is good luck to bring a SO. Tell her all Ant hunters know this...
Don't get too frustrated. It is a very difficult target to hit, being in the right place at the right time. But when you do, that is what make it special.
So Perhaps I'll share a bit of my newbie experience this year:
In March, my GF allowed me to buy my 8 yr old ant farm. She probably regrets that now, lol, and that unwittingly started me down the deep and vast labyrinths of ant-keeping. We ordered Ants off of Amazon (I now know that they were Pogonomyrmex O.).They were only workers, so they died off after a couple of months but I grew further engrossed in many aspects of ant keeping ranging from founding colonies, nuptial flights, DIY formicariums, care, identification, brood boosting etc.... The list goes on and on.
In June, bought a Componotous from a local Ant Keeper in June. This one I accidentally killed from heat exposure. I'm an idiot and it got too close to the heating coil that was under a towel. RIP queen Big-Butt. Not my choice for a name but what do you expect when you put it to an 8yr old?
Around the same time, I was on my motorcycle when I noticed there were tons of insects in the air. I ran home grabbed some test tubes and rescued about 10 Tetras. I say rescue because they were getting attacked by other Tetras. Since then I have only about 3 left. Two with about 10 nanitics, I sent two to the Ant Keeper mentioned before. Both reportedly died.
Only caught 1 roaming Pogonomyrmex in July all though there was lots of opportunity to do so. I blame poor timing and ignorance. However, I found out a bit about where some nests were. The biggest development though was probably in regard to online awareness. Sites like this, antwiki, antweb, antmaps, discord, reddit, the iNaturalist app, precipitation tracking, and even a local Facebook ant keeping group. The wandering Pogonomyrmex later died as she never was very comfortable in her chamber.
It was in the beginning of August that the last one really paid off. I got a heads up from the Facebook group that Pogonomyrmex were flying and was able to snag four queens from their founding chambers. I think Dspdrew has a couple of excellent topics on this. One definitely has eggs and another that might have eggs but I can't tell. I really wanted them to be comfortable so they have more of a natural set up with loam. As for the other two, I think one escaped and the other died.
Last Saturday, I took an 1.5 hour drive into the west desert in hopes of finding honey pots. I thought I had everything planned perfectly... equipment, previous colony sighting, nuptial flights for the species after rain at dawn... Another storm blew in and I ended up not being able to get the specific spot. I actually ended up stuck after driving over cut in the dirt road I was on. The cut had been undermined by a stream that formed from the heavy rain. Nearly fell into a sink hole and it ended up costing $1200 to get my car towed out.
The next day my GF and I went to get my car. Everything on the car was fine so I started to look around in mud puddles. You should have seen the look on her face when I said that I was going to stay a little longer and look for queens, LOL!
Anyways, I was able find about 20 yellow queens as they ran from Tetras. I think they are Lassius brevicornis. Not what I was looking for but still cool.
I like to think of it all as kind of an adventure. There is just too much failure and complexity built into the hobby to have rigid expectations. Maybe plan on something like a hike that overlaps with a good time for Anting. You might want to try ANTdrew's recommendation of trying blacklights.
