Hello everyone!
Sometime over the winter my son got very interested in ants and started researching Ant Keeping as a hobby and everything about it. He was convinced it was pretty easy and he eagerly await the spring to catch local queens. He kind of got me hooked too, but I was trying to temper his enthusiasm as I thought that catching a mated queen was going to be very hard.
I need not have worried since he turned out to be an excellent spotter! In early June he caught not one but four queens, all who immediately started laying eggs. The only unfortunate part was that they were obviously the same species, although caught in different places in the local vicinity. Then started the waiting game...
Sure enough each of those four queens now have offspring of worker ants in their separate test tubes. The colony sizes vary between 10 and 15 workers at the latest count. We've built different formicariums to eventually house them when they will be ready, but what we haven't done is been able to identify them.
After he caught the first 4 queens he later caught two other queens on a trip to Montreal (they have eggs but too early to see if they develop).
My son has since just left for University so I'll be the sole Ant Keeper for the next few months at least. So far we have not had too many problems other than for being unprepared for the condensation that formed unexpectedly when the first cold night arrived. It was a bit of a panic (and an attempt to introduce two of the tubes to formicariums) but they are now fine in their tubes.
Despite the tons of research we've done and videos galore, I'll still have questions that I eventually hope to answer here.
For now I'll post in the Ant Id Request to try to at least ID those thriving tubes.
In the future I'll post pics of the formicariums we made.
Thanks.
Dario
