Species: Messor Pergandei (Harvester Ant)
Date of Collection: March 28th, 2013
Location: Pinon Hills, CA (Southern High Desert)
Time: ~9:30pm
Conditions: Ants may have mated due to a major storm that occurred during the last week of February. The storm came in from the pacific and had a sub tropical tap which produced tropical type (severe) rains with warmer temperatures than usual. As a major storm, the ground remained moist throughout March which may have influenced the Messor pergandei nuptial flight.
Observations: Newly mated queens were spotted at night actively working on their founding chambers. Most chambers were inactive during the day time. The majority of newly founded chambers were located in sandy clearings such as roadsides, dirt roads that were mostly inactive, and dry creek beds. Anywhere free of plant vegetation.
In the middle of March, I was watering the trees in my yard when I noticed founding chambers all over the place. As I inspected them, I noticed that most of them where either sealed or were inactive with a visible entrance. I then waited until nightfall to see if I can dig up some queens. Well, I did and failed quite often. The soil even when moist was like digging into concrete. I gave up that night and tried again a few nights later. Well, I went out again with my flashlight and I noticed that the queens were coming out of their entrances to clear the soil. I checked some more chambers and the queens were doing the same thing. From there on, it was very easy to capture the queens. I simply waited for the queen to come out and bam, I captured her.
All in all, I was able to capture 10 Messor queens. I couldn't catch anymore because I ran out of test tubes and it was freaking cold!
As of right now, about 5 queens have eggs already. The only thing that worries me the most is that most of the queens are picking at the cotton and they are restless. I just have to remember that my honey pot ant queens acted the same way too before laying eggs.
I'll keep this journal updated.
So now I have 10 queens left with 2 in dirt setups that were established at the time of capture. Sadly, most of the queens weren't doing so well in their test tubes and it seemed like more queens were on their way to ant heaven. I don't know why this is happening.They are in the standard test tube setup and I practically left them in my dark closet with minimal disturbance 
. Now here is the interesting part, the 2 queens in the dirt setup have large clusters of eggs. They seem extremely healthy and they both have more eggs than all of the queens in the test tubes combined! This is exactly what happened to my honey pot ants. The honey pot ants in the test tubes didn't do so well compared to the active colonies I had in the dirt setup which I have now in their 10 gallon formicarium.
