How to find a queen ant after a flight

The mistake almost everyone makes is watching the swarm. The swarm is the males and queens going up, and it is the part you can see, so it grabs all the attention. It is also the wrong place to be looking if you want a queen.

By the time a flight is properly underway, the queens that have already mated are coming back down. They land, they reach round and snap off their own wings, and they start walking. That is the animal you want, and it is on the ground, usually within an hour or two of the main swarm.

So the timing is simple. Let the flight happen, give it a bit, then start looking at your feet.

Queens seem to like a warm hard surface to walk on, probably because it is easy going and it holds heat into the evening. In a town that means paving slabs, the edges of paths, the foot of a sunny wall, the concrete around a drain. Anywhere flat, warm and open is worth a slow scan.

They are looking for somewhere to dig, so cracks and gaps get investigated. You will often find a queen working along the line where a path meets a flowerbed, testing the soft ground.

Bring a torch if you are out after a dusk or evening flight. A lot of the more findable species come down as the light goes.

Size is the first tell. A queen is bigger than her own workers, sometimes strikingly so, and once you have seen the two side by side you stop mixing them up.

The give-away is the middle. A queen's thorax, the section behind the head, is deep and boxy, because it was packed with the muscle that drove her wings. A worker's is slight by comparison. Just after a flight a queen may still be carrying her wings, or two little stubs where they were, which a worker never has.

And she will usually be alone. Workers move in trails and crowds. A single large ant walking on her own across open paving, a bit purposeful, is very often a queen.

Nearly all of them die. This is the part worth sitting with before you start scooping queens into pots.

A founding queen has to find a chamber, wall herself in, and raise her first brood on nothing but her own spent flight muscles and fat, with no food coming in until those first few workers are old enough to forage. Most never find the spot. Most of the rest are eaten, or flooded, or dry out. Hölldobler and Wilson's The Ants lays out just how thin the founding bottleneck is: a colony you could name is the survivor of a lottery with thousands of losing tickets.

Which cuts two ways. It is why finding a fresh queen feels like a genuine bit of luck. And it is why picking one up off the pavement, where she was probably going to die anyway, is a gentler thing than it first sounds.

A quick, boring, important note. Whether you can keep a queen at all depends on where you live. Plenty of common species are fine, but some places protect particular ants, some ban keeping non-native species outright, and nowhere lets you help yourself to wildlife from a nature reserve. Have a look at your local rules first. It is a five-minute check and it is the difference between a nice hobby and a fine.

The whole thing hinges on being out at the right hour, because the queens are only walking around for a short window after the flight. Miss the flight and you miss the queens.

That is the part Dealate is actually for: the odds of a flight near you, scored from live weather and read out species by species, so you know which evenings are worth going out for. A reason to look up, and then to look down. Not a guarantee.

If you want to understand what sets a flight off in the first place, ants don't read the barometer covers the weather that really matters, and what is a nuptial flight covers the whole event end to end.