Based on my measuring tape, this ant is ~9/16th of an inch long, maybe even a bit longer depending on how it stretches itself. The ant is jet-black from above, but there are fire-red highlights on the upper legs and on the underside of the ant where the legs meet the thorax. The fire-red color extends all partially along the gaster. As far as I can tell the ant is mostly hairless aside from some slight hairs on the gaster, which you can see in one of the pictures. The ant does not have a sting.
I found this ant in my home office at 10pm at night (9/12), just inside of a sliding glass door which has a small gap that bugs and lizards frequently slip through. My house is situated out in the country with rolling valleys. I am surrounded by mostly farm fields (Apples) with patches of Redwood groves.My yard is landscaped with a small redwood grove, but the property is bordered on two sides by 100+ acre apple orchards that are organic dry farmed, so they are quite dusty and dry.
I assume that this ant is a queen because I have never seen an ant remotely this large near my house in the 20 years I’ve lived here. The only ants that I have seen this large are carpenter ant dozens of miles away. I have seen plenty of carpenter ants and this looks nothing like them, especially with the extremely bright-red highlights on the underside. It does look like it has the scars where wings would be, similar to the Pergandei queen that I have. I just had no idea that there were any nuptial flights this late in the year. I looked outside in my yard and the neighboring orchards for 15 minutes with a flashlight after capturing this ant but could not find any others wandering around.
As far as I know, other than a few different species of pavement-type ants, there is only one species of large ant that has been found remotely near my house and it is the native harvester ants here. They are extremely rare, but they have massive colonies with large lines of pure black ants running hundreds of feet. All of the workers are the same size .They have these massive, mostly-flat, irregular disk-shaped mounds of spent seeds that can be a couple of feet across. These ants do not have stings but are rather large and have pretty painful bites. When I purchased my Veromessor Pergandei colony, I was hoping that they would be the same, but Veromessor Pergandei are much smaller than these ants.
I have included pictures, but unfortunately both of my phones that I have could not focus very well on the ant. I could possibly try to take more pictures, but I am trying to leave it alone in my closet so it will hopefully feel comfortable enough to lay eggs.
