19 replies to this topic

[SoySauce]

My son and I are anting at Caspers today and we discovered this beauty in a founding colony underneath a small dirt mound.






We also saw this huge colony of ants:



We'd love to find a queen of that one too!

Edited by dspdrew, February 19 2017 - 11:59 AM.
Fixed coding

[Martialis]

Nice!

 

If you're going to use HTML code, use the coding tool.

[Alabama Anter]

Nice! The first colony is a Solenopsis xyloni colony!

[SoySauce]

Awesome. Many thanks for the ID!

[Alabama Anter]

Np!

[dspdrew]

Yeah, nice. You caught a little Fire Ant colony. The ants in the second picture are Velvety Tree Ants (Liometopum occidentale).

 

BTW, you posted the wrong code. You can't post HTML. You need to post bbcode.

[SoySauce]

Thanks Drew, I'll post the bob code the next time. We're heading east now towards the desert. My son hopes to find a honeypot and/or pheidole megacephelle.

[Canadian anter]

SoySauce you can buy some honeypots from droo come spring

[SoySauce]

Yep, we definitely will if we aren't successful finding hem ourselves.

So we ended up in Palm Springs. It was cooler today, around 58 and we didn't really see any ant activity above ground. But we dug a bunch of ant holes up and we found active colonies everywhere. We found a beast of a major that probably measured close to a half inch.



We dug up a nest that had two winged ants inside of it. We're thinking they may be alates but we're keeping our fingers crossed they're not. I'll post a picture of it when we get back to our hotel room this evening. We're spending the night and looking tomorrow. It's supposed to be much warmer tomorrow, over 70 so we're pretty hopeful. The ground in the desert was definitely moist and it was very easy to dig.

[Alabama Anter]

Definetley alates sorry

[SoySauce]

These are the winged ants we found too:

[Nexus]

These are males, you won't get anything out of them.

Why dig out a colony ? Can't you just leave the ants sleep ?

[SoySauce]

We are just taking a garden shovel of dirt, not digging out the entire colony. I thought drones were smaller than the workers? These are at least twice as large as them.

[dspdrew]

That's some sort of Camponotus major I think. Not sure what species. The alates look like Veromessor pergandei. Their nests should have alates in them right now, and they might even fly this week.

[SoySauce]

Thanks Drew. We spent the morning all over Palm Desert, Coachella and Thousand Palms. It was definitely warm today, bordering on hot under the desert sun. We saw a lot of fire ant and that Vermessor activity. We also saw a pheidole colony, but no nuptials yet. We plan on heading back to the Moreno Valley and eastward this afternoon and give it one last try.

[SoySauce]

Actually, one more thing I forgot to mention is that my son found a headless queen! It was definitely a large queen but it was dead w no head. I wonder if that means the nuptial flight has already occurred?

[SoySauce]

It was definitely still too cool and windy in the high desert near Joshua tree. But just east of palm desert was pretty nice. It was in the mid 60's today, ground was damp and very light wind. We were finally able to find another queen in a founding colony too:





We saw a pretty large variety of ant species too. Well there's maybe another or or so of ant hunting left and back home we go.

[Martialis]

I saw a few ants active in Indiana today. I caught a small Camponotus sp. founding colony.  None of the over hyped Prenolepis imparis, though. 

Edited by Martialis, February 20 2017 - 3:38 PM.

[superjman]

I saw a few ants active in Indiana today. I caught a small Camponotus sp. founding colony.  None of the over hyped Prenolepis imparis, though. 

Lol I think they're overhyped cause they're some of the first to fly in alot of places so its the first chance to catch queens for the year

[Alabama Anter]

It was definitely still too cool and windy in the high desert near Joshua tree. But just east of palm desert was pretty nice. It was in the mid 60's today, ground was damp and very light wind. We were finally able to find another queen in a founding colony too:





We saw a pretty large variety of ant species too. Well there's maybe another or or so of ant hunting left and back home we go.

Looks like Veromessor sp!