Raising an ant queen!

to raise an ant queen, first need a test tube and make it ready (see: //www.ifdip.com/2019/02/making-test-tube-ready-for-ant-colony.html)

you also need to identify the ant species to see if the ant queen is fully claustral or semi-claustral.
fully claustral means that the ant queen does NOT need any food while the workers have not emerged.

semi-claustral means that the queen needs to have an area outside the test tube to find food.
you can use a container (needs to have something that lets air through) and put the test tube in it.
place the food in the container (also some sugar water or something like that).

once you have your queen put her in the test tube you can make it darker by putting it in a drawer or, as I did, put some paper or something like that around the tube.

it is best to not check your queen too often as she can get stressed and eat he own eggs

it can take longer than 3 days (in my case it is ALWAYS 3 days) before she lays her first eggs. if you think it takes too long before she lays the eggs  it can be that she is not strong enough. my advice: Catch around 4 of the same species so you will me (almost) guaranteed that one queen is strong enough.

some ant species are polygynous. that means there can be more than 1 queen in a colony. I advice you to not put a bunch of queens together because that can result in 1 one queen surviving ( and the others very dead) or even ALL queens dying. but if the ant species is known to do that on itself, then why not? just make sure to have a other queen by itself so if your other queens die you still have one (and if they work out, just give it to someone that wants to start a ant colony of that species)

almost every phase of the eggs take 15 days to complete, so my final advice is: be patient!

hope this was helpful!


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