You'll never guess what I found today! Well... I guess you do already know what I found today since it's in the title... But that's not the point! The point is I now have 3 Lasius aphidicola queens and 1 Lasius claviger queen. All had come out of hiding underground today because it hit 70F here in Grand Rapids today and so Prenolepis flew and even Lasius neoniger started opening their nest entrances! With unfortunately Tetramorium immigrans opening entrances as well... But! These queens were the first ever Lasius queens I had seen come out of hibernation which means it is now spring here.
The claviger queen was easy to catch since she was just standing there at the hole, she came out of... strange... but at least for me that allowed me to catch her without harming her by accident. The aphidicola on the other hand were wandering in the grass with 1 of them attempting to infiltrate a Lasius neoniger colony which was neat since I've never seen that.
Ok... Now that I got all the juicy details out of what happened today, I'll get on with what my plans are for the queens now. I have no idea if Lasius aphidicola can tolerate polygyne so I need to look into it, but I may try having 1 dual queen colony and 1 single queen colony. The claviger will be solo since I didn't see another claviger queen, but she will be getting the most workers since she's my first ever Acanthomyops group queen and I want to take especially good care for her. Worker hosts will be L. neoniger and each aphidicola colony will get 100 host workers while the claviger queen will get to have 200 workers.
That's all for today! Tonight, I will post pictures and I want to apologize if this was very wordy. It's just that I'm very excited.
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The L. claviger queen is close to dead. I don't know what happened overnight. At midnight yesterday she was walking around happily in a holding container with water until I setup a test tube the next day. Today I checked on her and she seemed very weak and was moving very little. I noticed the day I caught her that she seemed skinny, but I thought she would be fine without food until the next day. Right now, she seems to be down to her last breaths, and I don't know what I did or what I should do. Anyone with experience with Lasius claviger or even parasite lasius in general please let me know what I should do. I fear she may have been the last claviger queen I'll find this month.
She does seem to like isolating herself a few millimeters away from the workers but hopefully she'll start to join in the hoard of workers. Currently she has around 80-100 workers left to be introduced but the first few workers usually are the biggest problem. I will update once the queen has all the workers introduce and then I will introduce soon aphids and some Acanthomyops brood. Stay tuned for next update!
