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 39 queen cutting an entrance DHJanzen100121.jpg high resolution
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| When there is a green soft thorn on the young ant-free ant-acacia, the founding queen cuts a hole into the thorn just as do the workers in an established colony. Note her large thorax (where her wing muscles were, muscles that are then part of her reserve food) and you can even see the tiny black stumps where she tore off her own wings after the mating flight. As mentioned above, she still is confronted with retaining her thorn for many months in the face of other founding queens attempting to get into evict her. These other queens probably, but not necessarily evict her brood as well and start over with their own (but, they might not, as a strategy to get a colony started as soon as possible). One of her major goals is to get a protective colony started fast enough to protect the young tree enough that it develops enough leaves to produce enough food to keep her young colony alive through the dry sesason to come. However, it should be mentioned that there are new founding queens being produced continually throughout the year (there is a mating flight every morning), but with highest numbers in the rainy season. This is presumably because the young acacias do stay leafy (green) throughout the dry season, and therefore at least theoretically a queen has a chance of establishment at this time. This is very different from ants that establish in inanimate structures (ground, rotten logs, tree trunks, hollow dead twigs), where the availability of wild-caught food for the founding queen is the key question - here, the production of queens is very seasonal (usually at the beginning of the rainy season). | ||
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