Secret Queen Ant Hunting Technique Revealed

Ant Sellers Never Want You To Know This.

Have you ever bought an ant colony or a queen ant from an ant seller? How much did it cost you? RM100? RM200? or even more? The situation got even worse when the queen ant you bought died a few days after you got it from the seller. That’s causing a lot of new hobbyists drop-out of the hobby because queen ants are too expensive to get. Knowing the secrets of catching queen ants will save you a lot of money. When I say a lot, I mean thousands of ringgit, because ant sellers marked up the price so high that by selling just one or two rare queen ants they will be able to cover the expenses on the queen ant hunting expedition. I’m not trying to demean other ant sellers here as some of them are my best friends in the Malaysian ant keeping community, they even taught me some of these tricks I’m about to tell you. There are risks that they take when they are out hunting for queen ants and that’s why they marked up the price. They put their lives on the line for every queen ants they caught, well not all, depending on where they went hunting.

Queen ant hunting is a very exciting activity to do especially when you are hunting with a whole group of friends. But you will have to divide the shares equally or use the who-spot-it-first-gets-the-queen policy. With that aside, it is very fun to ant hunt together with someone that has the same passion as you. If you don’t wanna share then hunt alone. Unless you don’t have a liking for outdoor activities and have a lot of money to spare, you can always buy queen ants from an ant seller or fellow hobbyist that caught too many queen ants.

So are you excited about catching these queen ants? Let’s get started.

#1 Go out a few hours after a rain

Here in Malaysia the average humidity is 80.5% daily and 20 days of rainfall monthly in average.¹ A lot of people don’t like the rainy season. But as ant keepers, whenever we see rain we see nuptial flights. That’s right, ant keepers love rain because it will increase the humidity level to approximately 88%. Unlike countries in the West, queen ants have nuptial flight all the time, including day time, without any rainfall.² They can do casual pavement walks and find queen ants all around. But that is not the case here in Malaysia. We rarely see queen ants in the daytime except for some pseudomyrmecinae ants, for example Tetraponera rufonigra (arboreal bicolored ant). Sometimes Oecophylla smaragdina (Asian weaver ant) in the morning where the air is soaked with morning dew. But most of the time, nuptial flights take place during the night when the humidity is high especially after a rain.

After the rain subsided, what species of ants can you expect to see crawling around? Probably some of the common species if you are queen ant hunting in an urban area, species such as Camponotus sp, Nylanderia sp, Pheidole parva, Crematogaster sp, Solenopsis geminata, sometimes Polyrachis dives, Odontoponera denticulata, and Carebara diversa. If you are hunting in a rural area, you might find rarer species such as Polyrachis thrinax, Odontomachus simillimus, Anochetus sp, and a 2cm unknown Camponotus queen³. But if you are hunting at the outskirts of a forest, be prepared to be surprised by what you will find. You might find Odontomachus rixosus, Pheidole megacephala, Pseudoneoponera rufipes, Colobopsis explodens, Myrmecaria brunnea, and if you are there at the right season, you will find Dinomyrmex gigas (the largest ant in Asia). But this all depends on the nest of the ants available there. It’s like real-life Pokémon where we need to check the map for the nest of the Pokémon to hunt them.

#2 Light and Wall

Based on my personal experience, the best time to hunt queen ants is in the evening where it is dark and bright lights attract invertebrates. Ecologists call it light pollution that disrupts the ecosystem.⁴ Queen ants are not excluded in this case and are more likely to be attracted to conventional tungsten lights, bulbs, and spotlights, instead of LED lights.⁵ I usually look for queen ants on the road where road lamps are available. If there’s a white plain wall, ants will usually congregate on it as well when there’s a light shining on it. This is very much similar to an entomological light trap where entomologists build to collect insects.⁶

Back in my university days, I always cycled after a rain in the evening around the library, exam halls, and different faculty buildings, just to walk around walls that had lights shining on them. Here’s a video of what my ant hunting experience was like (please don’t mind my terrible amateur YouTuber voice). Sometimes I caught a lot of queen ants, and sometimes I got nothing. Ultimately, ants’ nuptial flight depends on their seasons. Only twice a year where I will be able to catch Carebara diversa queens, twice a month for camponotus sp. queens, and Nylanderia sp, and Pheidole parva almost every single night even when it is not raining.

#3 The big secret REVEALED!!!

I’m sure that you have seen ant sellers sell small plastic vials in their shop that you purchased to catch queen ants. These vials appear to be inexpensive, but it costs you a lot more than you can imagine. These vials limit your catch to only the number of vials you have, which also limits your chances of success. Imagine you only have ten vials so you can only catch ten queen ants. If you found an 11th queen ant, you will need to release one of it or the queens will formic acid spray each other if you keep two queen ants together in a vial. But you do not know which to release because you are not sure which of them are actually fertilized or which will die before the first worker emerges. So you need to catch as much as you can to lower the risk of death and infertility. You can’t always buy these vials from the ant sellers because there’s actually a method that is technically FREE. Ready for the big reveal?

I once watched on a YouTube video that someone used a huge 5 litre water bottle, stuffed with a lot of crumpled tissue paper in it. And guess what, that bottle was filled with queen ants. The queen ants did not formic acid spray each other because there are plenty of spaces for them to hide from each other. Probably one or two will meet each other in some corners but they will run away from each other as soon as they meet. Even if one ant sprays formic acid, the tissue paper will absorb it all and not affect the other queen ants that’s in the bottle. That is genius.

You might say that you don’t need that much queen ants because you don’t have enough test tubes to keep them. Well, the 5 litre water bottle can be scaled down to a 350 ml plastic container with a few pieces of tissue paper in it, chuck it in your backpack and you’re good to go. You can still keep a vial or two in your pocket whenever you go out without your backpack because you will find queen ants in the most unexpected times. Trust me, I’ve been there before.

Caught too many queen ants?

No worries. Just sign up as a Queen Ant Farmer. We will buy queen ants from you. It’s not gonna be as much as earning from a colony of ants, but we will never take our partners for granted. So if you ever caught too many queen ants during a nuptial flight, please don’t put the queen ants together and have them kill each other. Sell it to us. Or at least release them back to the wild so that they can continue to grow even more colonies.

With that said, I hope you guys benefit from this article. Happy Adv-ANT-uring.

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References:

[1] Climate in Kuala Lumpur (Kuala Lumpur Federal Territory), Malaysia, World Weather & Climate Information, Retrieved date: 23/12/2021. [Online]. Available: https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Rainfall-Temperature-Sunshine,Kuala-Lumpur,Malaysia

[2] AntsCanada, “How to Catch A Queen Ant.” (Jun. 19, 2016). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWSIe5iZk3Y

[3] Quah, “Camponotus sp10.” Photos and Info on Ants and Termites of Malaysia. (September 9, 2013). https://termitesandants.blogspot.com/2013/09/camponotus-sp10.html

[4] F. Hölker, C. Wolter, E. K. Perkin, and K. Tockner, “Light Pollution as a Biodiversity Threat,” Trends Ecology & Evolution 25, vol. 5, pp. 681-2, Oct. 2010. DOI:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.007.

[5] A. Wakefield, M. Broyles, E. L. Stone, G. Jones, and S. Harris, “Experimentally comparing the attractiveness of domestic lights to insects: Do LEDs attract fewer insects than conventional light types?” Ecology and Evolution, vol. 6, pp. 8028-8036, Sept. 6, 2016. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.2527.

[6] A. R. Calor and R. Mariano, “UV light pan traps for collecting aquatic insects”, EntomoBrasilis, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 164-166, Jul. 2012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12741/ebrasilis.v5i2.187.