I believe I have two distinct species of carpenter ants, but would love to get more specific info, and am wondering if either species will tolerate being in a multiple queen setup, as it would be super cool to start up a baby super colony if I can. Each test tube has a letter label (left over from when I first caught the queens.) The two different ‘variants’ I have are tubes D&G, and tubes H, C & A.
1. Location of collection: Just between Watertown and Black River in upstate New York,more specifically my backyard area behind the apartment complex I live in (see picture below).
2. Date of collection: May 9th 2018 (For the queens only, brood was laid and raised in captivity)
3. Habitat of collection: Open grassy quad, some pine and maple trees nearby. Maybe 500ft from the Black River, which is behind my apartment and across a street.
4. Length: 15mm for all the queens, the workers in tubes D&G measure 7mm and HCA’s workers are 6mm.
5. Coloration, hue, pattern and texture:
DG: Queen- Dull solid black head, with a relatively shiny black thorax. The gaster has a somewhat striped pattern, where there are three stripes of a dull black (measuring ~1.5mm wide each) with short gold hairs, and between these three stripes are thinner shiny black stripes.
Workers- A somewhat shiny black across their heads and thorax, while their gasters have a similar pattern, with what appears to be 4 lighter colored stripes interspersed with stripes of the same color of the head and thorax. The workers also display the short golden hairs, but not as prominently.
HCA: Queen- Dull solid black head. The thorax has a strange pattern (see crude crayon sketch) with a reddish brown color for most of it, along with a dark stripe across the lower third. Additionally a small dark stripe comes from the top middle of the thorax down to about the halfway point, not quite meeting the dark stripe. The gaster, like the other group, has a somewhat striped pattern, where there are three stripes of a dull black (measuring ~1.5mm wide each) with short gold hairs, and between these three stripes are thinner shiny black stripes. The upper segments of the queen’s legs are the same color as the thorax.
Workers-A somewhat shiny black across their heads and thorax, while their gasters have a similar pattern, with what appears to be 4 lighter colored stripes interspersed with stripes of the same color of the head and thorax. Most do not obviously show the gold hairs that their queens display. A few of the workers appear to have the same reddish color on their thoraxes, though this is not common. Their gasters seem to have some light ribbing or bumps that corespond with the striping present.
9. Nuptial flight time and date:5/9/2018, Late afternoon- early evening, before 7:00 pm. I wish I had taken better notes than that but in my excitement of catching my first queens I was not very thorough.
10. Here is the link to my pictures! https://photos.app.g...ad4NzVsEER9ong9
