STRATEGIES FOR CAPTURING A QUEEN ANT

In the process of developing any ant habitat, you have the option of buying your personal ants or capturing them. In America, for instance, it is very unlawful to transport queen ants from one state to another. You can saturate your habitat will varieties of worker ants or obtain a queen. No habitat without a queen can exist for too long because it reduces as more and more ants die. On the other hand, any habitat that comprises of a queen increases and multiplies in population.

Catching a queen ant involves the following step by step guidelines:
Identify an ant colony in the outer part of your house and observe the mating flights whenever drones and queens move away from the colony. Both drones and queens are characterized and identified by wings.

Watch out for the specific ants that go back to the ground and remove their wings following mating flight. Certainly those are the new queens because the drones die as soon as they complete the mating flight.

Capture one of the newly matured queens the moment it removes her wings and put her in your habitat. Following the addition of the queen to the colony, it can possibly take some weeks before you can notice the worker bees showing up on the ground surface.

It is suggestive that you obtain a queen ant for your own habitat by just capturing one within already established colony rather than hunting for a young queen by endless waiting. Turn rock and logs upside down till ant colony is discovered. Closely examine the ant with biggest thorax, this is certainly a queen. In addition, go ahead to capture many workers from her usual colony to ensure there are adequate ants in your habitat so that the queen can be looked after.

Search a not too big colony and uproot the whole colony with the aid of a shovel. Gently position this colony inside a bucket and examine thoroughly through the dirt in order to relocate the queen in addition to other ants to your habitat. You may find this strategy valuable and effective only if you have chosen to begin with an existing and operational colony.

It is strongly recommended that you put your captured ant inside refrigerator before transferring them into your habitat. This would ultimately reduce their body temperature and demobilize them momentarily; hence it becomes easier to safely transfer them without escaping.