Description

Every year, many ant families pass through our shop, and occasionally, we encounter injured queens. Since our business has always operated with quality as its top priority, we provide every customer with verified, fully healthy queens for each species. However, we do not neglect the injured ones; we nurture them for months, giving them a chance to recover. During this period, they naturally experience a much higher mortality rate than healthy queens. But those who do heal and successfully establish a colony have a high chance of living a long and prosperous life. Our own experience proves this: we keep a colony led by a queen who was missing her middle-left leg. We decided to keep her back then—she is a Messor angularis, now 8 years old with approximately 5,000 workers.
In this section, you have the opportunity to purchase these and similar queens or colonies at a discounted price, reduced according to the severity of the injury. We only list colonies here that have been with us for at least a month, meaning their original injuries have healed! Please note that for these colonies, we provide a live arrival guarantee only for the duration of shipping; we cannot offer further guarantees beyond that.

• Leg Injury (Least Severe): This hinders the queen’s movement, which she doesn’t strictly need deep within the nest while laying eggs and raising offspring.
•• Exoskeleton Dent (Moderate): A dent on the queen’s outer shell resulting from an impact. If no internal organs were damaged, this is merely an aesthetic flaw.
••• Antenna Injury (Most Severe): The antennae are vital sensory organs used for both smell and communication.

Because leg and antenna injuries often involve open wounds, there is a risk of infection which can be fatal. This usually becomes apparent within a few weeks; if the wound does not become infected, it heals properly and will have no further impact on the queen’s long-term health.