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[Antsinmycloset]

While I'm pretty happy with my seven queens (even if I'm down from nine, sigh), I do have a couple questions for the more experienced ant keepers.

First, I see from the journals and posts that there's an unnervingly high failure rate for young queens and colonies. Long term, I'm hoping to have just a handful of long lived colonies. They don't have to be large, but obviously it's important for them to be healthy. How feasible of a goal is this? To those that have been in the hobby several years, what is your longest lived colony? Is that sort of success pretty rare? Catching queen after queen and watching them die in the first year or so sounds a little soul crushing.

Speaking of failure rates, all of my nonCamponotus queens still have their wings. I recognize wings are far from a foolproof sign of fertility, but roughly what percentage of your viable queens kept their wings? Being vague is fine; I realize there's likely a lot of variation between taxa.

That said, I want to thank everyone here. This is a very active, helpful community, and it's made getting into the groove of things a lot easier. I may not always respond to your replies, but I always read and appreciate them.