This is my first year anting and I've been super excited. I lucked out pretty hard and my girlfriend found a queen Camponotus pennsylvanicus. in her backyard about a week ago so I was able to catch her and set her up in a test tube. All is going well there. The problem appeared when I started taking apart her shed today. It was in pretty bad condition so I was expecting termites but instead we found a huge colony of Camponotus pennsylvanicus. and another huge colony of Crematogasters. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the Crematogaster queen but I was able to capture a LOT of camponotus workers and alates. That would have been perfect if I had found their founding queen, but I was not able to locate her. There has to be 100-200+ ants in this jar and some of the alates have begun ripping off their wings so I have no idea what to do. Since they havent mated I know that they arent really reproductively viable. I have a few questions and could use some guidance.
1) Is it worth trying to set up test tubes with the virgin queens accompanied by a few workers?
2) Do people buy virgin queens or male altes for any purpose?
3) If I'm able to find male alates from another colony will I be able to put them in test tubes with my virgins and have them mate successfully?
4) How long will all of these virgin queens tolerate being together before there is an all out war inside of this jar?
5) Should I just take the entire jar somewhere and let the ants go?
I don't think trying to introduce these workers to my already established, yet tiny, colony is worth the risk and I couldn't really find the brood chamber of the wild ants to even attempt brood boosting. What should I do?
TLDR: Found a wild colony in a shed and don't know what to do with the captured ants.
