I drove out to Whitewater after work Tuesday, getting there around 8:30 pm. It was pouring rain the entire way, but the second I got to Whitewater it mostly stopped and turned intermittent. I parked on the 111, and the second I stepped out, I saw a queen heading back down its founding chamber. I waited 'till it came back out again and snatched it. It was a Myrmecocystus queen. 
Later I met up with nurbs and we found a whole bunch of these queens, along with some Veromessor pergandei and Pheidole barbata. The craziest part is how these queens were digging their nests in the rain. The wind was crazy too, and very annoying. Most of my queens I got by sitting and waiting for them to come out of their chambers. Digging them up results in a much lower success rate. That's why Mr. impatience didn't get as many as me. 
The Myrmecocystus queens are the ones with a redish head, purplish thorax, and yellow/brownish gaster. I have seen queens of those exact (what at first seemed unique) colors end up being M. mimicus, M. wheeleri, and another orange and black species I have not yet ID'd. I'll bet there's even more species with queens colored like that. I did see a few active Myrmecocystus nests with orange and black workers while I was out there, so I'll bet that is the same species as these queens. I sure hope so because I have a colony of these (assuming it's the same species) that got fairly large, but now their queen seems to have stopped producing.
I guess nurbs checked the area southwest of Palm Desert, and it was bone dry, so apparently the precipitation maps were a little inaccurate. it looks like the rain never made it very far into Palm Springs. I checked the far west Desert Hot Springs area, and it was dry too. Hopefully we get a bigger storm that can actually make it out to the desert before too long.
