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The release of the queens

Several weekends ago, my wife asked me to weed in our backyard.  I obliged, but on my way to get some equipment, I noticed something very unusual in the backyard.  The carpenter ant colony was releasing their queens and males.

First, I am not a myrmecologist and my knowledge of ants and carpenter ants comes from reading several books and observing them in my backyard.  Therefore, some of the information below may be incorrect.  If you know some of it to be false, please let me know and I will gladly correct it.

To be honest, I’m not sure if all of them were queens, all were males, or if there was a mix, but I suspect the latter.  Their clearly were smaller winged ants and larger ones.  I watched and photographed the phenomenon for a good hour.  While in my opinion none of the shots are great on their own, altogether the tell a very interesting story.

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Are carpenter ants really dangerous?

As some of you know, I have a decent sized carpenter ant (Camponotus modoc) colony in the backyard of my house.  Someday I’ll probably have to get rid of it when we want to sell the place, but for now it has provided some interesting photographs.

Over the weekend I found them active as usual once I picked up a few pieces of wood.  Under one piece I found some that were quite large – probably among the largest ones I have seen.  This got me to thinking, how dangerous are these guys (or in truth – ‘gals’) really?

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Book Review – Carpenter Ants of the United States and Canada

OK, I have to admit that this book is not for everyone.  Who should read this book?  Hmmm… Well, if you’re not interested in carpenter ants, you can skip this review.

I happen to find carpenter ants quite interesting and one species of them – Camponotus Modoc, is very common around here.  Therefore, when I saw Carpenter Ants Of The United States And Canada on sale at a used book store, I decided to pick up a copy and learn more about them.

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Sometimes mistakes have interesting effects

This weekend we finally had summer!  Well, at least we had one day of it.  By Sunday things were chilly again and the weather forecast says it may snow later in the week.  Still, it was nice getting out and photographing things and a number of insects, such as ants, became much more active.  I have almost finished reading the book “Journey to the Ants”, which is fascinating and has taught me a lot about some of the behavior of ants.  One thing I didn’t know was that, with a few exceptions, most ants are not active in the cold.  This makes sense, but I had always figured they were up to something – just I wasn’t seeing them.  Still, the carpenter ants became active in my backyard.

I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to let carpenter ant colonies thrive in our backyard, but so far they seem content to live in the rotting landscaping timbers.  As I understand it takes a long time for them to do any structural damage to a house and I have not seen them near the house anyway.  I decided to play my first ant “experiment” and took a carpenter ant from one part of the yard and placed it by carpenter ants in another part.  I expected to see the ants not get along at all but for the most part they didn’t fight at all.  The ant I moved did hide in a hole and peep out every once in awhile, but other ants from the native colony were in the same hole.  Therefore my hypothesis is that the colony is larger than I thought and that all of the ants actually belong to the same colony.

While photographing the ant, I made the mistake of not correcting the aperture from some earlier shots I took of the kids.  The result was I wound up with a much lower aperture than I ordinarily would have used.  The effect though, is interesting and I’ll show some shots after the jump.

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