6-10-15
On May 29 I met Foogoo to return his bucket trap that I had been borrowing. We went into Chino Hills State Park because I had seen P. californicus staging for a flight the previous evening. The first P. californicus colony we hit, the workers were swarming all around the entrance to their nest. We saw the leks form and only took alates that we had seen mating or dealates wandering around. I came back home with 15 queens. I came back the next day and found what might have been hundreds more all along the trails, but only kept 4.
I put 6 of these queens into test tubes, 2 more into grout nests connected to foraging containers, and the rest into dirt formicaria. I combined some of the queens both to conserve space and because they seemed to get along. The queens in test tubes and the queens in the grout nests have all laid upwards of 5 eggs each by now.