Yellow meadow ant
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Yellow meadow ant ( Lasius flavus ) |
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| ( Fabricius , 1782) |
The yellow meadow ant or yellow garden ant , also amber yellow ant ( Lasius flavus ) is one of the most common ants in Central Europe . It belongs to the subfamily of formicinae (Formicinae) to the genus of garden ants ( Lasius ) and within the subgenus Cautolasius .
features
The workers are 2 to 4.5 millimeters long. The color varies between a delicate yellow and brownish yellow. They are very easy to confuse with specimens of other yellow garden ant species.
The sex animals are much darker in color. The queen is 7 to 9 millimeters long, the smaller males 3 to 4 millimeters. They swarm from June to September and, like all Central European species, hibernate.
distribution and habitat
The distribution area extends over Europe , Asia , North Africa and the east of North America .
The yellow meadow ant can be found in many gardens with larger lawns, on meadows and forest edges and also takes up damp locations. They often lay their earth nests under stones and build extensive mounds of earth that are often completely overgrown by grass. In the Dellenhäule nature reserve there is an “ant town” which, with thousands of nest mounds overgrown with grass and herbs, is the world's largest occurrence of an ant species.
Way of life
It feeds almost exclusively on honeydew , which is excreted by root lice that are bred in the underground nests . Because of this type of food supply, the yellow meadow ant rarely leaves the nest to look for food. That is why the nests hardly have any exits.
The sex animals swarm mainly on warm midsummer days. Colony foundation is often done by several queens ( pleometrosis ). Later a fight takes place among the queens, so that only one remains and the colony becomes a monogyny .
Worker with root lice
Winged queens
Males and queens leave the ground nest
Earth nest of the yellow meadow ant
Workers with larvae
"Ant town" in the Dellenhäule nature reserve with nesting mounds of the yellow meadow ant
Queen of the yellow meadow ant
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Audio
swell
- Heiko Bellmann : bees, wasps, ants. Hymenoptera of Central Europe . Franckh-Kosmos, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-440-09690-4 .
