The AntsCanada Ant Forum's

Hi i have caught a ton of queen ants i know nothing about ant keeping and was wondering if these ants are ready to lay eggs if there was any way to tell. i allways thought queens were hard to come by how can people sell them if theres so many about?

You should never catch so many queens. It causes a major ecological imbalance.

If you caught them as they were walking around or flying around, they are fertile. If they don’t have wings, then you can be sure beyond a shadow of doubt that they are fertile.
There are many vedios on how to take care of ants on AntsCanada’s YouTube channel that will help you with taking care of newly caught queens.

I suggest you release most of them soon.

Don’t worry about imbalances your good. This is a extremely tiny percentage of queens. Still, it’s not very practice to have so many, and if they aren’t separated they will start fighting. Where did you catch them? Were they coming out of a nest entrance surrounded by workers? If so they may not be fertile. I would release most and keep probably 5-10( unless ur planning on joining the gan project) but yeah definitely watch plenty of AC’s old toturials. The ones you keep you need to separate into test tube set ups. Shedding their wings may be a sign of being fertile, but plenty of queens never shed their wings and raise a successful colony, and others shed their wings and aren’t fertile.

Oh ok. I knew it was not a good idea to catch so many queens. I thought it was because of the above mentioned reason rather than the fact that they will fight.

Silver wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 04, 2018 12:42 pm

You should never catch so many queens. It causes a major ecological imbalance.

If you caught them as they were walking around or flying around, they are fertile. If they don’t have wings, then you can be sure beyond a shadow of doubt that they are fertile.
There are many vedios on how to take care of ants on AntsCanada’s YouTube channel that will help you with taking care of newly caught queens.

I suggest you release most of them soon.

Queens sometimes break off their wings even if they didn't mate. Queens also sometimes keep their wings through the entire founding stage. So if a queen has wings is not the best way to tell if she's mated. If you don't believe me, check out AntsCanada's old videos on his Lasius neoniger colony with a fertile queen that has wings.