Setup
Went outside earlier this morning after it stormed last night. It was extremely muggy and hot out (high of 90 F), for it being so early. I had inklings that there would be a flight later that day. The flight appears to have started around 2 PM, and lasted until about 4 PM local time.
Driveway of hell
Dermy mentioned something about it being warm in Canada, and that reminded me to go check. There were a few alates on the driveway trying to take back to the air—the driveway was well over 100 F, so some may have been fertile, but just trying to escape death. Sure enough, within 5 minutes, several struggling alates had died.
The haul
I collected one or two, and, determined for more, went driving around town. I came across a few in the back of a hotel parking lot—hotels are mostly empty during the day. Went to another hotel, where dealates were all over specific portions of the curb. Not to be too greedy, I collected about 40 queens before leaving.
Mission
I'll boost all these queens in order to achieve instant colonies. I don't really care about keeping these things, but I needed this species in particular to study synthetic ant diets (long-term effects on colony growth), given some recent publications.
Queens were placed in various types of setups:
- Standard water reservoir, cotton test tube
- Moistened cotton, no reservoir test tube
- Moistened chipboard, no reservoir test tube
- Finely ground polyacrylamide, hydrated, test tube
- Plaster-filled petri dish
- GroTube XL
I'll boost them later, once the least viable ones have been weeded out.
See also:
I commonly observe flights in this area around Mother's day. Seeing how Mother's day was just over a week ago, I would say that this is pertinent information for my area.
I know others have found Solenopsis invicta 1-2 months ago in their region, some even further north. I would speculate these are overwintered queens. In my area, every mound I knocked over had alate pupae, but very few if any functional alates. On that note, I believe this to be among the first regular, non-overwintered flights in my region.
Edited by drtrmiller, May 18 2016 - 11:27 AM.
