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Seeking a Meat Ant Queen

I am having a second go at setting up an Ant Farm. In my first attempt I purchased an ant farm enclosure and a funnel ant queen and workers. After a while the queen died. Ant livestock tend to be expensive - lots of work required capturing a queen, freight and then maintaining while workers hatch. I am a cheapskate so this time I decided to capture my own queen.

Meat ants or gravel ants (Iridomyrmex purpureus) are endemic in Australia so a queen should be easy to capture. Also, while not the biggest, these ants are on the larger end of the scale. With my eyes, I wanted something I could see.

For meat ants, you look in spring and in autumn. Spring is preferred. For Canberra, this works out as in October. Today my attempt was in the beginning of November. Three things are required for a mating flight: damp ground from rain over night, sufficient temperature and low wind conditions. We had lots of rain late yesterday and so I thought it was worth a look.

I had previously found two meat ant nest just near work. I examined them at 12:30pm and found one of the two nests was beginning the process. At 12:30 I saw drones on the surface of the nest. These were about the same size as workers but with wings. They were popping up and the back underground.

When I visited again around 2:30pm I could still see the male drones but now could also see queens. These were three or four times the size of the workers but with wings. I could see 15 or 20 of them, a large number for such a small nest.

That was about the end of what happened. The temperature was nice but the wind was up and I would guess either too much wind or not sufficient temperature. In any case I checked down wind for queens.

What is supposed to happen is that the males will fly early and are then joined by the queens. Once they have mated - on wing but drifting down wind - the queen lands and removes her wings before finding a place to begin a tunnel. She will dig 10 - 15cm down leaving a little mound of dirt. I will try again tomorrow.

While this article records my experience, my actions were based on: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1440-6055.1974.tb02212.x