Flying Ants - September

This month the flying ants have been out, a true indicator that the temperatures are warming up. September is normally the annual return of flying ants. The soil is warm, and the ants emerge with wings, and it is breeding season once again.

They love a sunny calm day, and we all get covered with these little insects, and luckily, they don’t seem to bite, but we find them in our hair and on our clothes. You may also notice the smell, there is always an ant odor when the ants are swarming.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-why-winged-ants-swarm-nuptial-flight.html

I have read that:

Flying ants are known as alates. The winged insects you see are almost always the sexually mature queens and males of the black garden ant, Lasius niger. The larger ants are the queens.

This annual swarming event usually occurs in spring when the weather warms up. Weather conditions are critical for the coordination of swarming activity.

Ants live in a caste system, where individuals have specific jobs. The queen lays the eggs while female workers look after the queen, eggs and larvae. They also gather food, enlarge the nest, and otherwise ensure the colony runs smoothly. Most of the eggs develop into workers, but when the colony is ready, the queen begins to produce virgin queens and males.

When the winged males (drones) and virgin queens (princesses) emerge from the nest, they scatter to maximise the chance of mating between different colonies and reduce inbreeding.

An ant colony can only expand so much. At some point a new queen will need to strike out on her own to begin a new colony. She needs to meet and mate with a male from a different colony and find a new area in which to start building her nest. Growing wings and flying enables her to do this.

So, each year, alates emerge from nests and take flight. They aren't interested in people or picnics - they are just looking for a mate.

The large, winged females and the smaller winged males are often seen flying joined together. This is known as the nuptial flight. One of the reasons to swarm is to increase the chance of reproduction - with larger numbers of their species around the ants won't have far to look for a mate.

During this brief, once-in-a-lifetime mating period, a queen usually mates with several males.

Once ants have mated, the role of the males is over. The mated queens quickly chew off their own wings and begin looking for a suitable site in which to nest and set up a new colony. This is why you often see large ants walking around after a 'flying ant day' and may even see discarded wings scattered over pavements.

The ants you see the rest of the year are female workers, gathering food for the colony.

Once the queen has found a suitable site, she digs herself an underground chamber and lays her first few eggs, which she rears to adulthood. She won't eat for weeks - not until her first brood of daughter workers are ready to forage for food for her.

The stock of sperm the queen received during the nuptial flight will enable her to lay fertilised eggs for the rest of her lifetime. And she has many egg-laying years ahead of her, often reproducing until a colony is thousands strong (large nests can have more than 20,000 workers).

Males don't do any work in the nest and are only produced by their colony during flying ant season. They develop from unfertilised eggs. After the nuptial flight, the male ants usually only live for another day or two, so not much more than a week in total. Their sole reason for existence is to mate with new queens.

Lasius niger queens can generally live for up to 15 years (although L. niger queens in captivity have reached 28 years). But they spend most of their lives in their nest. They only spend a small portion of their lives as winged or flying ants - when they are young queens that need to establish a new colony of their own.

I found this article above interesting. It was published in UK, which informs us that there are flying ants in many countries across the world.

I notice they also like landing on my car, but normally seen flying in swarms. If you go for a bike ride or walks, it can be challenging at this time of the year, as riders can get ants in their mouths, which isn't much fun when riding up hills.

Here are a few photos I took of the flying ants during the past weeks

Betty Matthews

15 September 2023