So one day after the attempted nuptial flight, the workers of the colony became fed up with the love-starved princesses and started to cull them.
For anyone upset that I fed the alates to my other colonies-
this is what happens in the mother colony of the alates when they become annoying.
The workers dragged them out by the legs and wings and formed a killing circle and pulled on all appendages (a killing method many ant species do and which I even described in my school science project with Formica ants 30 years ago).
A very brutal way of saying: "You have outlived your usefulness and are now a burden to the colony, you are worth more recycled and fed to the next generation."
I have observed this behavior of culling alates in some of my other colonies (e.g. Acanthomyrmex), however, my Temnothorax acorn ant colony tries a very different approach: In the Temnothorax, the queen alates just rip off their wings and start behaving like normal workers, doing all the chores. I can see the demoted princesses out foraging.
