i don't know if i really need to start a journal for this but incase this goes well i might as well have somewhere to put it,
I'm quite sure the 2 queens i have are formica rufa group somethings i found 1 while camping and another while on a hike late june i believe, they look the same but the one i found camping is noticably bigger,
i stuck them in test tubes like normal then after some reading realized these are parasitic queens,i was gonna just let them go but i figured id give it a try since I've already had them close to a month, i was gonna try hibernating them and some workers a couple weeks and after a terrifing raid on a rufa nest i ran for my life with some vials of pupae and my wife laughing at me, if youve ever delt with these lunatics youll know all about it, anyway i figured if i gave them more than they could eat maybe some would survive,
with the pupae there was 1 newly hatched ant which i figured was good as dead the second it entered the testtube but since it was just hatched i did it anyway, and I'm pretty that queen rufa was gonna rip it to shreds but stopped and let it go, so at this point i had dumped a pile of burittos(pupae) into each of the queens without them losing their minds or eating any of them which is pretty shocking to me after how agressive these ants are,
i tried to get some pics but didn't want to press my luck so i got them back in the dark before stressing them out anymore
after being in the dark for a while the larger queen has started caring for the eggs a bit and has resisted killing the new guy and the smaller queen has been taking care off things like a champ and opened 2 workers and seems to be feeding them possibly so things are looking ok sofar
