Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Unknown queen ants

I caught these ant on 10 July in the afternoon. The location is Belgium. 



I tried getting one of them out of the test tube and stressed them out a lot... I hope I didn't kill them with that stress (the one that dropped out literally left a white trail for 4cm...). I thought they where solenopsis fugax but apparently they only fly in August/September so now I'm thinking tetramorium caespitum since they look like another ant that I caught a little earlier. The only thing is that those Yellow Marks are not that clear on caespitum.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Queen ant identification

This ant was caught on 30/06/2019 Belgium. She is 5ish mm in length.
The picture was taken using my phone and the ant was in a glass container so the quality isn't really good.

The ant is very calm,  I walked 2km with it on my hand and it hardly tried to move.

I currently have her I a semi-clausteral setup in case she is a queen.

Friday, June 21, 2019

queen ant or bee?

Caught in Belgium at 21:00, near a park, 21°C, 59% humidity, 1.022mBar and 11km/hour wind from the North. with the last rain not longer than two days ago.

Pictures






Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Lasius Niger ant brood

Some pictures taken some time ago of the Lasius Niger colony. The pictures are mostly of brood as you'll see.
  • In the first picture you can see a larvae. This picture allows you to easily see the hair on the sides and the "mouth" area of an ant larvae.
  • Here you can see  a size comparison between an ant freshly outside of it's cocoon and a larvae.

  • Here you can see the an ant that is out of it's cocoon and almost fully changed color to the dark black/brown that the workers have.

  • In this picture you can clearly see a few eggs and somewhere in those eggs the first stage after leaving the cocoon becomes visible.

  • And lastly a size comparison between a cocoon and the "hatched" ant.

Thursday, June 6, 2019

Unkown queen ant caught

I caught a queen ant in an elevator late at night, I assume it was stuck in there so she might have flown hours before capture (~11pm).

I caught her in the center of Leuven, a city in Belgium. Put her in a test tube setup and took some foto's which are below. Her size is comparable to a Lasius Niger / Lasius Umbratus but she doesn't look like a niger at all and has a way to long abdomen to be an Umbratus (If you look carefully at some of the picture then you can see that her abdomen is nearly the same length as her head and center body combined).

Now I was interested to know what species she is but most importantly whether she is fully or semi clausteral. FYI she already laid eggs and shed most of her wings while in a fully closed test tube setup.














Sunday, June 2, 2019

short video:

Long version:

Ant pukes: (same ant)

A different ant that had something similar the day before (pictures this time)





Saturday, May 4, 2019

dead (presumable queen) ant

A while ago I caught a social parasite. She died (probably by dehydration) and I managed to get some pictures of it. While taking pictures she lost her abdomen so I didn't take many pictures. The last photo is a scale reference for the last 7 pictures (including the scale reference) and each grid is 0.1 by 0.1 mm















The pictures that follow will have the size of the grid in the last picture with the size of one of the squares equal to 0.1 mm by 0.1 mm








Unknown queen ants

I caught these ant on 10 July in the afternoon. The location is Belgium.  I tried getting one of them out of the test tube and stre...