Bay Area Ants

During the past month, my friend and I have visited a small trail head in the Santa Cruz mountains two time to catch queens of the genus Pogonomyrmex . We believe that the species we have caught is Pognomyrmex subdentatus , but we are not 100 percent sure on the identification. For this reason, this post is titled Pogonomyrmex cf. subdentatus queens. The "c.f" means "resembles" in ant taxonomy, and is used when one is not sure of the exact species, but has an educated guess on it. These ants are one of the few species of harvester ants in the bay area. There are only four documented species across the entire bay, 2 of which have never been kept by ant keepers. These harvester ants will harvest seeds from their territory, and store them in huge underground granaries. These seeds will then be shelled by the powerful jaws of the workers of this genus, and the resulting nutritious seed will be fed to the workers, larvae, and queen. These ants also help disperse seeds

      On March 30, I had the pleasure of going queen-ant hunting near Mt. Diablo with a friend. I managed to catch a handful of queens, all of which were of the species Camponotus quercicola. I proceeded to put them into a test tube setup, which is commonly used for keeping starting queens, with some added oak bark that we collected from the trees which we found the queens on. This bark would apparently help them settle in better, as another antkeeper couldn't get his to lay second batches of eggs until he added oak bark to their enclosures.      Just a few days ago, I noticed that a few of the queens had gotten their first workers! As of now, 3 of my 4 queens have workers. By the way, I caught 7 queens to start with, but one was infertile (so I released her), and two I traded/gave away. The workers are quite large, around 8mm long. They are the second largest Camponotus species in CA (that I know of), the largest being the rare Camponotus ocreatus. Here are some pictures of