Okay so first off, I caught the the first queen on Feb 1st, at 3:14 pm while exiting my school with one of my friends. Another friend had given me a test tube at lunch so when I saw the queen on the ground I took out my test tube, which already had an aphaenogaster male alate inside of it, and put the queen in there. I wanted to see how they’d react, but they really didn’t mind each other. I thought the queen was Lasius sp. at the time. Literally that night I had a dream that I found a Prenolepis imparis queen because I’d been thinking about them so much. Then the next day, on Feb 2 at 3:48 pm, as I was talking to people in an Instagram ant group chat about how I can never find any Prenolepis imparis queens, I saw a Prenolepis queen mating with a male right beneath my feet as I was approaching my doorstep. I immediately put the queen and male in a test tube. Yesterday I just got confirmation that the two queens are infact Prenolepis imparis.
Here is a picture of the first queen:
And here’s the second queen:
Last night before I went to bed, at around 8pm I taped the queens’ test tubes together so they would form a two queen colony. I woke up at 7am this morning and found them huddled up together:
Its cool how these queens still haven’t dropped their wings. It just goes to show that the method of looking to see if a queen has lost her wings will tell you if a queen is fertile or not, is false.
That wraps up the first entry of my journal, and I’ll update it more when something happens.
