I hope you might be able to help identifying my 4 queens I recently found. It was in the end of June on a hot and humid evening (6-8pm). They were located near a road in a mainly rural/suburbian area.
The all queens had already lost their wings. They are about 1cm (0.4 inch for my fellow Americans) long and have a very dark-brown or I'd say black color.
My guess would bee Lasius niger. Can someone confirm or object this?
Here is the best picture I could make of one of the queens:
To the leg of one queen another ant was clinging. It fell off dead later in the testtube and I was able to get it out and under some microscope:
Picture with some lab-software:
This ant was brown as you can see and about 2mm (0.08 inch) long.
Is this from a different species? Did it try to attack the queen while defending its own colony? What do you think?