So I'm attempting to introduce brood and workers with a queen of the same species as I'm pretty sure she's parasitic from research, and I got to thinking. I use to raise bees once. With bees you can introduce a new queen to a hive of bees when your queen dies, etc, by putting the new queen in a small box that has wire mesh on one side to allow the colony and the hive to smell each other. One end has a wet cotton ball for moisture for the queen. The other end has a candy plug made out of sugar basically. If you put her directly in with the new workers they would kill her but as they work their way through the candy plug to get to her, they slowly accept her scent and adopt her as their own. Being the bees and ants have a lot in common, I was wondering if anyone has tried this with ants and if it would work with parasitic queens or even ant species that aren't parasitic. Thoughts? I've added a link for a picture of one of these boxes in case you do not know what I'm talking about. Click Here.
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