The AntsCanada Ant Forum's

Help! All of our queens keep dying after a few days in the test tube. Any ideas what could be going wrong?

My family and I beginner ant hobbyists, attempting to start our own pet colony. We are located in Southeast US, currently Tennessee and previously Alabama. We have found aprox. 5-10 queens in the last year-long period. Some were at our previous home in AL last year and some were here in Tennessee this year. We put them in a test tube set-up closely following the instructions on AntsCanada channel, but none of the queens have survived more than a week- with one exception being a very small ant which survived for several months but never produced eggs ( who we tragically lost in a house fire last winter...). The other ants have all been of a larger variety, which may or may not have something to do with the problem.

Any ideas why our queens keep dying?

There are many reasons for why your queens wont stop dyeing the most probable ones are they have not mated or there are not queens.

That could be it. We are fairly positive that they are queens, just judging by their appearance, especially the massive mid section. But now I am wondering if they could have been unmated. A few had wings still and a few did not. Would this be the most likely possibility for a wingless queen? Can you give me any other advice on this? Thanks!