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WELL!
dispite the fact you guys made it feel like winning the lotery was more likely, it happened!
ill start from the beggining:
My Myrmica rubra colony of about 50 started making flying males...
I boosted the colony when my housem8 mowed througha rubra nest in the garden.....
1 of those 'boosted lavae' was a queen!....
Today i see , what i thought was my queen, walking around ontop of the cork nest i keep then in with a male close by. Then i noticed a wing that looked the same size as the males wings. taking a closer look at my colony i see my queen inside!
Therefore i imagine the other queen is alllll knocked up!
I have put her in a seperate container to make sure she starts making eggs then i might put her back in with the rest
1) who needs a large distance mating flight? :P
2) although not fully insest, they still did it! :P
3) i hope she is preggers or ill be eating my words :D
The other males are still in the nest which is strange.
She might not be, but its possible, I dont know if Myrmica are inscetous, there are lots of species that are tho, it may be that she will become a worker, and if she starts laying unfertilized eggs (males), and the colony is not strong enough to support them, she may be killed
More intersting behaviour, the male tryed to go back into the nest but the workers seemed to not let him , then when i came back he was dead! either he died nanturally like they do soon after mating of the workers beat him to it as he couldnt take a hint they didnt want him back.
suppose he'd had his fun
The Queen was very dispondant from the colony after getting rid of her wings which is why i put her in another container
My Rubra colony is making males at the moment. I don't know if thear any queens inside.. The colony have 200 workers and 4 queens.
<--checks his colony to see if it is producing any males.. but i dont think it is.
yeah i hear a colony tends to make males or queens rarley both
I was just lucky the rubra in my garden were making queens :)
I did obtain a new colony of 5 queens of rubra from the garden a few weeks ago , hopefull they will make queens in future to go with my antstore males :)
And when you've got more queens, does the colony produces males and Queens??
that may be the case im not sure, the nest i got the queen lavae from did have some more big lavae wwhen i put them in and i have ended up with 5 males.... its likely that some of the garden lavae were males and queens
It's not like winning a lotery. As far as I know, M. rubra is different when it comes to mating. They don't have classical mating flights. Only males fly to other colonies where they mate. New queen then continues in already established colony and parts only after some time. So what you write about is quite possible and doable. Nevertheless you need some luck. I think with some L. niger you would never have done this.
For sure M. rubra queens can use their wings, and they also can create a new colony alone. But maybe they copulate on ground, not in air like most Formicinae. Anyway, nice surprise.