I have some happy news this week! Just eleven days after capturing those five winter ant queens, I looked into their test tube nests. In the nest containing the three queens from March 18th, I spotted three eggs. The following day, the brood pile had grown to seven eggs. I discovered that one of the three queens inside was trying to get out of the nest, so I moved her to a separate test tube to reduce how stressed the two fertile queens were, and also to prevent an infertile queen from eating the brood, which would obviously be awful for the other queens. After removing the likely infertile queen, the other two were definitely more relaxed, reducing the likelihood that they will consume the eggs, or worse, kill each other. See you next week!
