I captured a carpenter queen and she died 3 days later

[SlidingCool]

I found a huge queen in my bathroom and I am pretty sure it was a Camponotus Pennsylvanicus and she had a huge gaster and an enlarged thorax. I caught her and put her in a test tube set up and I checked if the cotton was wet and she could drink water, she hadn’t laid a single egg and I was concerned and one night I checked up on and she had DIED! Does anybody know what happened?

(Note this is my first ever queen I have ever catched so let me know if I did anything wrong.)

[SavANT]

Newly mated queens have a slim chance of survival, both in the wild and in captivity

[SlidingCool]

Okay, thank you

[SolenopsisKeeper]

Newly mated queens have a slim chance of survival, both in the wild and in captivity

No? Plenty of people have great survival rates with this species(60% estimate).A reasonable situation though is she may have been infected with a parasite or have encountered something(pathogen) in the sink.

Also, I have lost 4 out of 20-30 queens, all of which have eggs. Queens don’t die often, unless they have a disease, and infertile, not mated, pathogen, parasite etc.

[LaniLyne0106]

Im sorry for your loss . A few things could have happened. We can rule out lack of water as you said you checked and it was fine. Another possibility is that you could have checked on her too often, camponotus are very sensitive to movement, vibrations and light exposure they become stressed and may even eat their eggs from that kind of stress it’s best to check on them 1 or twice a week. And the things mentioned already by SolenopsisKeeper are not preventable (before capture) and have no true way to tell which could have happened to your queen