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They are out in numbers right now. It looks like niger and/or neoniger and some social parasite which I believe may be lapites. If anyone's been looking now's a good time!

Thanks for this post. What's the best time of day to look?

MaxGen wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 22, 2017 7:44 am

Thanks for this post. What's the best time of day to look?

I was wondering the same thing, because tetramorium fly early in the morning, and other queens, like temnothorax (acorn queens) fly around 5-6, so what time of day should I look for Lasius queens, by the way this is my first year so I definitely wanna catch a Lasius queen because of all the great things I've heard about them!

Hey there, sorry it's taken me so long to sign back in! Life's been busy and I had a lot of ants to see to.

On further inspection the species flying were L. flavus and L. lapites that night, not niger or neoniger. I just didn't get a good look at them until today as I didn't want to stress them.

I'm not incredibly experienced myself as I just started researching the hobby back in January, but I've had a lot of luck and I've been keeping records on weather when I find my queens. I found my local streets lights were swarming with these queens after the sun went down which I was between 9-9:30. I always check the ground nearby a swarm of bugs on a light, and if it's dark be sure to get lower to the ground if you can (you can use the torch setting on your cell phone as a flash light) as smaller drones can be harder to see in low light. If you see drones swarming odds are there may be newly mated queens nearby. We'd had a huge thunder storm roll through the day before this flight. When I check the time to look for good nights for Queens in Ontario I've found that usually if it's before 11 am or after 7:30 pm you've got a good chance finding a random queen on the side walks near a lot of grass or trees, or under debris by the curbside (Obviously don't do this one on or near busy streets) but only as long as it's still 15C or above outside. Almost all of my 40-some-odd queens I've captured this year were all found on days where the local weather radar was reporting 50% (Ideally 70% or higher) or above humidity, 4 km/h or less winds (Ideally 0 because ants are bad fliers), and low precipitation (Though some species love to fly just before rainstorms so they would maybe enjoy high precipitation). It's very species dependent.

As for Tetramorium you may be too late. According to the AntsCanada Nuptial Flight video they fly from June to July, thought you may catch some stragglers. If you've missed them you can always try a GAN farmer!