Hello, so this week is about my other pair of Nylanderia queens. This pair has an absolutely enormous brood pile, indicating that both queens are contributing to their future colony in the making. the pile is mainly eggs, but there are also quite a few larvae. The larvae are the ones with yellow dots, which is actually food created from the queen’s own excess wing muscle tissue! Yes, that does sound absolutely disgusting to a human, but most founding queens can’t raise brood otherwise.
They are also amazingly tolerant of each other now, as when I first paired them up, they ran to opposite ends of the test tube. Today, it looks like that never happened. This is great to see as it likely meant they did actually want to cooperate in founding a colony together.
I know they are fertile because I caught both queens separately as mating pairs, then decided to pair them together because I was low on available test tubes at the time. This resulted in a full hour passing between the initial capture and pairing of these two polygynous queens. Fortunately for both of them, my forced decision was the correct one, as they managed to peacefully settle their differences.
