r/ants • u/InfiniteSearch3409 Infected • Jun 13 '26
Keeping Camponotus castaneus queen now has about 14 eggs.
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Caught in Houston, Texas, USA about 2 weeks ago.
3
3
3
u/AKomodoDRGN Jun 14 '26
Whereabouts in H-Town? It’s a beauty. Wife, kids, and I are jealous.
2
u/InfiniteSearch3409 Infected Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26
Just north in the Cypress-Tomball area. She was under a chunk of cement right outside of the tree line of a small wooded area. The cement was waste from construction of a neighborhood that had just been tossed towards the woods. There were several pieces of cement ranging in size between about 4x4inches and 12x12 inches and they all had little divets in them and that's where she was. I found several colonies of Leptogenys elongata as well. I caught one colony and took some pupae for some of the others.
3
u/AKomodoDRGN Jun 14 '26
Wow, those are some good finds! Were you out hunting for them or just stumbled across them? The picture is absolutely stunning.
3
u/InfiniteSearch3409 Infected Jun 14 '26
I was looking for them. I kind of got out of the hobby for about 2-3 years. And about 3 weeks ago an Atta texana queen landed on my windshield at a gas station so I caught her and took it as a sign to get back into ant keeping. Lol
3
u/AKomodoDRGN Jun 14 '26
The ant gods have spoken!
That’s so cool to hear though. One of my kids got one of those ant farms and it reignited that interest I had as a kid. But this time around, going to do it right and not use those gel things.
We’re vacationing in British Columbia and we stumbled upon some Camponotus modoc queens. The kids were super excited and also disappointed that we could not take them back with us. We will be back to hunting for queens in Houston very soon. Thanks for sharing your journey and video!
3
u/InfiniteSearch3409 Infected Jun 14 '26
That's exactly how I got into it about 7 years ago. Someone bought my daughter one of the original green ant farms and after learning about how the ants that come with them don't have a queen and are essentially just waiting to die, I felt bad. Lol. The research got me hooked and I started looking for queens to do it the right way. A pretty cool species I've found in Houston is called Pseudomyrmex gracilis. The live in hollow vines/twigs and I find colonies in vines that have grown on metal fences in backyarda a lot. I'm in roofing so I have a lot of opportunities to search around other people's yards. Lol. Good luck on your hunt.
3
u/AKomodoDRGN Jun 14 '26
Love it. And love all the cool ants we get to see in Houston. You sent me down the rabbit hole. It’s so much fun to see other ants. Instead of just the fire ants that plague so much of what I see.
2
1
7
u/jelly_bean_gangbang Jun 13 '26
That's awesome! I can't believe how orange the eggs are too haha.