My queen has abandoned her eggs. Help.

[AntsDakota]

Hello everyone!

I recently got a lot of help on my post for "My queen won't lay eggs?" topic, but now I have an even bigger problem! As she is finally laying eggs (I have discovered two thus far), she seems to be abandoning them immediately! Obviously this has me concerned as ants don't typically abandon their eggs. So what is going on here? Is she too stressed? Are they infertile? What is going on here?

EerieEcho

Your queen probably tends to her eggs when you leave her alone and in darkness. When you check on her, she only thinks about survival and abandons her eggs until you leave her alone again.

[EerieEcho]

Perhaps so, I checked Sunday when I got home from a trip and she had carried one of the two back over to herself in her corner, but the one is still by itself. It looks to be okay, so maybe she is just messy and tends to scatter her eggs around. I hope everything goes well from here on out.

[EerieEcho]

Also, unfortunately she died overnight, I tried my best but she was probably too stressed to survive. I'll post a picture of her for identification, but she is dead so unfortunately it won't be pretty.

https://imgur.com/a/tpoqsZz

I used my pointer finger as reference, she is not even big enough for my fingernail, so she is very tiny.

[allenjl3]

I imagine she is getting air in there... despite the tape/etc?

Anyways --- if she's still alive, she obviously is... I'd recommend covering her with a dark shirt or something and leaving her alone in a room that isn't air conditioned, basement maybe? (if you have one).

[allenjl3]

Oh, sorry... I just saw the death post.

Sorry!

She looks like Formica to me... but I'm also a noob.

[allenjl3]

If you're ever in Columbus, I'm trying to give away Formica queens lol... I caught 21 queens today in about 2.5 hours of walking hahahha.

[EerieEcho]

Yeah, but the one that passed away was not the queen in question. Victoria is my messy Carpenter queen who just really likes to spread her eggs out. But hey, life goes on, and I just found a new queen of the same species that died. Lasius I think is the Genus? Anyways, I may post her as a queen for sale if she survives, since I can't have too many colonies at once (as the other household members would be furious with me lol). But yeah, life goes on they just had the flight today in Geneva again! I swear every week there is a flight!

[AntsLuxembourg]

Sounds great. Btw I've got some fashion queens too. They laid dozens of eggs and I managed to move the queens and most of their eggs to the new testtube. Each move felt like a damn surgury to me since I had to be very carefully with my tweezers. Sadly I destroyed some of their eggs. :C But only arround 7 in total. But now they are all inside their new testtubes which offer them more water and more space for the whole colonie.
I also found out that all 7 Lasius Niger queens are fertile since they all had at least a dozen eggs hidden on the cotton to dring or lying arround inside their nest there. Well I will try to find some more queens today since it rained a bit during the night yesterday and if today is a nice and sunny evening I might be lucky enough to find and catch some more queens. I also still got like 93 more testtubes to seperate them.

[FaranAli]

The queen u caught....i think is not a lasius specie...except lasius niger,every lasius specie have a head bigger than abdomen,i got same queen but i could not identify too.

Update: This is my first queen and when i captured her,she was mating in my house.after 2 days of capturing she laid 5 visible eggs...i mean which we could see qith ***** eyes, she lays very small eggs and we could only see eggs from 2 cm or less

[EerieEcho]

Welp, now I have a new issue... Victoria is acting very strangely, its almost like watching a seizure. She is very uncoordinated and can't walk very well and keeps flipping on her back. I'm worried she is going to die... I know there isn't much I can do with that, but I am really worried that she is sick! I just hope that she will be okay eventually but it had been a while since I checked on her and when I saw her I had to flip her a few times before I realized she couldn't walk on her own.