Earlier this year I received this colony fragment as part of a trade with another keeper. He originally had a 14 queen colony, but split off a 4 queen group for me in exchange for a Novomessor cockerelli colony. When they came they had around 70-90 workers and a bit of late-stage brood. Here's a pic from right after getting them with all 4 queens.
Since then they haven't grown a ton, mostly due to the delay in generations (since all their brood was late-stage, they had no young brood and had to essentially skip a generation of workers) but are now right back on track with quite a lot of brood of all stages. They also seem to randomly produce alate larvae, but never let any pupate. I'm not exactly sure why, but my theory is that either one of the queens is infertile, or they keep trying to make alates before the workers realize the colony is too few in numbers and kill/eat the alate larvae before allowing them to pupate. Either way it doesn't seem to be a big deal as they still have plenty of worker brood.
Unfortunately, even with 4 queens, S. aurea are theorized to be a relatively slow-growing Solenopsis species, so these guys probably won't be able to get 20k workers in a year like my old 2 queen S. xyloni colony. Still, their awesome coloration makes it totally worth it, and it means that it'll be all the more rewarding when they do eventually grow to a larger size, not to mention that they really haven't been documented in captivity at all.
Edited by CheetoLord02, January 27 2021 - 12:26 AM.
