Update 8-2-2015 The original queen is all by herself now. She continues to lay eggs, but none of them ever get far before she ends up eating them.
On 7-18-2015 a pretty good sized storm went through the Palm Desert/Pinyon Pines area, and the next day more of these flew.
Retroman
was able to grab a few alates which he then captive bread at home. He gave me a few he thinks might be fertile.
At first I divided them up into four groups. I put three of those groups in small dirt boxes, and left the fourth in the cup they were in when I got them until I finished the large setup I was creating for them. Each group had one dealate, one alate, and a few workers, all from the same original colony. Two of these dealates I noticed had a few eggs with them.
Before I could finish the large setup, most of the workers, and the dealate in the cup had died. I'm not sure why, because they had everything they needed to stay alive for the time being. Once the large setup was finished, I swapped the bad "colony" out with one of the "colonies" in the small dirt boxes.
This large setup is actually another dirt box, but made from a 10 gallon tank.
If you want to know how I made this, I have it all posted here (
https://www.formicul...ge-3#entry24464).
So far of the small dirt boxes, two I can see actually had chambers dug by the queens, because of the large chunks of dirt. In one of them, I can see the queen sitting in there with a small pile of eggs, so that's a good sign.
As for the "colony" in the 10 gallon dirt box, well, so far they haven't dug anything. They all just keep running around all over the place. It's a good thing I have the lid on it, because the alate keeps trying to fly away. This makes me think she might not be fertile. I'll give these a few days, and if they still haven't dug a nest, I think I'm going to replace them with the good colony that has eggs.