Some advice about ant behaviour please

[paultraynor]

Hi

I live in Stafford UK. I am used to seeing winged ants leaving their nests in Jul/Aug but this week Tues 21 Sep we had a flight from a nest in the garden. How unusual is this?

Secondly we have an indoor heated swimming pool which regularly has ants nesting in the structure and running about on the floors - I suspect they find the continuous warmth conducive to an indoor life even though there is no food source for them - but this week I found in excess of a hundred large dead ants on the floor along one of their favourite runs. They were the size of the ones we normally see flying in the pool room in the summer and crawling on the windows but no sign of wings on these or of any discarded wings and all within inches of the run along the wall. What is going on there?

Finally earlier this year I changed the pump in the boiler house and when I cut the old three pin plug off the cable for reuse it was packed with ant bodies - and I mean packed - they looked smaller tha usual ants. Could we have a colony of the "electrical ants" that the press reported on earlier this year?

Thanks for any help or comment.

Regards

Paul

[Klaas Reißmann]

Hi Paul,

you can't lump all ants together. There are more than 100 species of ants in central Europe, many very similar species and every species has got it's own lifestyle. Things like temperature, day length, humidity etc. are the factors for mass aggregations (that's what it got called, when ant queens and males mate) of ants. Every species has got it's own faktors and males normally start later than females or the other way round (depends on the species). So f.e. you can watch the mass aggregation of Formica rufa in very early spring. Faktors for the aggregation are the longer getting days, the warming up and some more. Others, like Lasius niger, wait for summer until temperatures are at a special point or higher at a special time of day and so on. And you have to know, that there are normally hundreds of ant nests in an acre and often many different species, even one species is dominant.

If those ants aggregated late in the year, you can be sure, that those are totally different species to those you normally watch doing it.


The ants in your indoor pool can be a problem. It depends on which species it is. Normally it is a very small (somewhat max. 4 mm), yellowish or light brown antspecies with darker tip of the abdomen. This is Monomorium pharaonis which was introduced from India or Indonesia to Europe and which is living synanthropic. If it is so, and your "packed" plump sounds like it, you do have a problem, because those ants are vectors of different serious diseases, a pest in material and possibly even a pest in stored food.

It would be better to see a photo of some of those ants to make it sure or to disprove my suspicion.

Regards
Klaas

Edit: The bigger ants are normally queens. The queens need their wings for the flight for mating. After this they have no more use for the wings and loose it or take it off activily. So the once with wings didn't mate yet, whereas the once without wings already mated and are surching for a place to start a new nest. The male ants die off after mating.

[nightshade]

Originally Posted by paultraynor

Hi

I live in Stafford UK. I am used to seeing winged ants leaving their nests in Jul/Aug but this week Tues 21 Sep we had a flight from a nest in the garden. How unusual is this?

Secondly we have an indoor heated swimming pool which regularly has ants nesting in the structure and running about on the floors - I suspect they find the continuous warmth conducive to an indoor life even though there is no food source for them - but this week I found in excess of a hundred large dead ants on the floor along one of their favourite runs. They were the size of the ones we normally see flying in the pool room in the summer and crawling on the windows but no sign of wings on these or of any discarded wings and all within inches of the run along the wall. What is going on there?

Finally earlier this year I changed the pump in the boiler house and when I cut the old three pin plug off the cable for reuse it was packed with ant bodies - and I mean packed - they looked smaller tha usual ants. Could we have a colony of the "electrical ants" that the press reported on earlier this year?

Thanks for any help or comment.

Regards

Paul

People I know had a problem with ants that had moved into the substrate that their underfloor heating was laid in, they never suceeded in eradicating them, and that was 35 years ago.

[aeshna5]

I did note a lot of flying ants- almost definitely Lasius niger- mid-week when we had warm sultry conditions (how different now!) in London. This is possibly the latest I've seen mating swarms. A flock of wheeling Black-headed Gulls was quick to latch onto this fact!

We didn't have too many suitable days in August when it was often wet + cooler than average for nuptial flights- this may have been the last oppurtunity this year as temperature/humidity just right.