You caught a queen this week. Now what?

There is a queen in a tub on the counter. You found her walking across the paving after a flight, you had nothing better to hand, and you have since opened seventeen browser tabs that disagree with each other.

Most of what you are reading is about setting up a proper founding formicarium, which is a real subject and not an urgent one. This is about the next few days.

Choose a quiet place away from direct sunlight and knocks. Check the species' temperature requirements before adding heat.

Keep inspections brief, but still check the water supply and remove food leftovers when feeding. A queen that needs food or a host colony cannot be cared for by leaving a closed container alone.

This is the part that feels wrong and is true anyway for most of the species people pick up off a pavement in July.

A mated queen comes down carrying the fuel for the whole founding attempt inside her: the flight muscles she has no further use for, and the fat she built up before leaving. Fully claustral founding means she seals herself into a chamber and metabolises that, laying eggs and feeding the larvae from her own body, taking in nothing from outside until the first workers are old enough to go and forage. Her stored reserves allow her to raise that first brood without foraging.

Food can still help a fully claustral queen. In a controlled Lasius niger founding experiment, queens fed cricket pieces weekly produced more pupae and workers combined than unfed queens. The researchers removed uneaten food the following day. Do not leave leftovers to decay in the tube.

Some species found semi-claustrally and need food while raising their first brood. Social parasites need workers from a host colony. Confirm the species and its founding strategy before choosing a feeding routine.

The one physical thing that matters early is water.

She needs humidity without drowning in it. Whatever she is in wants a source of moisture she cannot fall into, and it should not be sitting in a puddle. Bone dry and she desiccates; swimming and she does worse.

A test tube with water held behind a cotton plug provides a drinking surface without an open pool. A separate dry cotton plug at the entrance allows ventilation while keeping the queen inside.

Wing shedding alone does not prove mating. A delay before egg laying is not enough to diagnose an unmated queen either. Check the species' founding schedule and winter-rest requirements before judging progress.

Take photographs through the container and note where and when you found her. Use those details to request an identification without repeatedly handling her. Confirm whether she can found alone, needs food during founding, or requires a host colony; the care differs substantially.

Before collecting, check the rules for your location and the species, including restrictions in protected areas. Make sure you can legally keep the queen before taking her home.

Weeks of nothing, mostly. Eggs eventually, then larvae, then a small number of very small workers that look nothing like the colony you had in mind. That is the correct outcome, and the timeline stretches or shortens depending mainly on how warm she is kept.

If you fancy another go at it, the flights are not over. In Britain and across Europe the black garden ant, Lasius niger, will take any warm, humid, still afternoon it can get across a long stretch of summer. In North America the equivalents are species like the black carpenter ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus, and the cornfield ant, Lasius neoniger, the latter worth knowing about because its queens mate on the ground near the nest rather than in a swarm overhead, so you find them walking rather than raining down. Either way, the back end of the season belongs to other species again.

That is what Dealate is for: the odds of a flight near you, scored from live weather, species by species, so you know which evenings are worth being outside for. Not a guarantee.

If you have not found one yet, how to find a queen ant after a flight covers where they land and how to tell a queen from a worker, and the flight timetable covers which hour of the day to be out.