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.

The failure mode for new keepers is almost never neglect. It is attention.

A founding queen's entire strategy is to hide in a small dark space and not be interfered with until her first workers arrive. Every time you pick up the container, carry it to a window and have a look, you are doing the opposite of the one thing she needs. Repeated disturbance is a good way to end up with a queen who eats her own eggs, and it happens far more often than starvation does.

So the instruction for this week is short. Dark, warm and stable, well out of the way of knocks and light. Room temperature is fine; a hot windowsill is not. Then walk away and leave her to it.

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. She is not hungry. She is running down a battery she charged before takeoff.

Putting food in with her does no good and some harm, because it goes mouldy in a small humid space, and mould is a real way to lose a queen.

Not every ant does it this way. Some genera found semi-claustrally and do have to hunt while raising the first brood, and if you have one of those the advice inverts completely. Worth confirming which you have before you commit either way. If she is a black garden ant, Lasius niger, which is what most people in Britain and across Europe are holding, or a carpenter ant or cornfield ant of the sort you would pick up in North America, she is fully claustral and she wants to be left alone.

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.

That is the entire reason keepers use a test tube with water trapped behind a cotton plug. You do not have to build one today, and a queen will sit safely in an improvised dark container for a few days, but it is the first upgrade worth making and very nearly everyone converges on it eventually.

Some of them are not, and there is no way to tell by looking.

A queen you found already walking with her wings off is a reasonable bet, since shedding tends to follow mating, but it is not proof. Queens do sometimes come down and dealate without having connected with a male, and there are always more unmated queens wandering about after a flight than anybody's tally suggests.

The test is time. If several weeks go by with no eggs whatsoever, an unmated queen is the likely explanation, and no amount of adjusting the setup will change it. Worth knowing now, so that the waiting does not send you into a spiral of fiddling with her, which loops back to the first section.

Identification is a good job for an evening in a fortnight, and a bad one for tonight.

Take a couple of photographs through the side of the container if you can manage it without hauling her into the light, note down where and when you found her, and leave the actual identification until you are not also trying to keep her calm. Where and when will narrow it down more than most photographs do, because species fly in characteristic months and at characteristic times of day.

Whether you can keep her at all depends on where you live. Plenty of common species are perfectly fine, but some places protect particular ants, some ban keeping non-native species outright, and nowhere lets you collect from a nature reserve. Worth checking before you get attached to her.

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.

Almost none of them make it in the wild, which is the background fact worth holding on to. It is why a fresh queen feels like genuine luck, and why picking one off a pavement where she was probably going to die is a gentler thing than it sounds.

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.