Reading about how to catch and take care of queen ants has made me remember something that happened long ago. Now I realize I had a queen ant by mistake!
I was somewhere, in a little woods, and sometimes I would see big black ants crawling around doing ant things. One day there were more of them crawling around and some of them were much bigger than usual and slower. I watched them trying to figure out why they all were walking around. I didn't know but thought that with so many it wouldn't hurt if I took one. So I caught a big one in a container. I think it was a plastic bottle. I put wet paper or something in so it wouldn't dry out, and took it home intending to figure out how to feed it and have it as a weird pet. I put it somewhere, it got moved around, and eventually lost and forgotten.
Poor thing.
But then later, much later, months later, I found it and opened it and found the ant inside along with a few other normal big black ants! I felt ashamed to have forgotten it, but mostly couldn't figure out how the other ants got in there with it! I don't clearly remember what the container was, I think it was a plastic bottle. I don't know. But the ants were too big to get into it, even tiny ants couldn't have gotten inside. And the big ant was alone and less than the volume of the other ants combined. It was a mystery to me! I also don't clearly remember what I put inside for food, if anything, or how I kept it from drying out, and how I got air in while blocking everything else out. Maybe having the screw cap on but loose so air could go between the threads and the bottle. It had fallen into a little box and then a few things had fallen on top so I didn't see it for months.
I was torn between being ashamed of trapping this poor giant ant in a container and losing it and it starving all that time somehow while I forgot it,
and, dying of curiosity over how it survived so long, how these _other_ ants got in there with it and why they all weren't eating each other, or maybe they were even if that made no sense. A friend told me they stayed alive by eating each other and didn't know what I meant when I said it was impossible. They also insisted I had to have put all the ants in there, there was no other way.
And I kinda wanted to keep it, but realized I didn't really know how, and it was obvious since I lost it for months that I couldn't be trusted to do anything but kill it anyway. So I decided to let them go...
I took them back to that area and put them next to a tree or stump or log on the ground. They looked completely confused and unhappy in the wild compared to the container, another mystery for me. They stayed closer to the big ant than away, but the big ant seemed to want to scrunch down against the side of something. I really did not know what to do. I knew I couldn't take care of them, but they didn't know anything about where they were either. It would be torture to put them back in the container, but how were they supposed to take care of themselves being scrunched next to something? I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do!
So, I decided they had zero chance of surviving with me, and a slight chance of surviving after getting kick outside into the wild, so, I gritted my teeth (yes, I really did that) and explained to them (yes, I really did that) why I had to leave them there even when they didn't know what they were doing. They just waved there antennae and legs and looked lost. And I left them there while looking back the whole time. It was sad.
Now I realize I had found a queen Carpenter Ant and had blundered into starting a tiny colony of them by leaving her alone to do her queen ant business, and she had her few nanitics with her, maybe five or so. And leaving her exposed next to a stump in a woods was well-meaning but they would have been eaten immediately by a bird or maybe other ants.
But now I know dumb luck can help me even more now that I know queen ants don't need my constant help and worrying over in order to start their colony. But it was only luck that she survived that long.