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Southeastern US Ant Nuptial Flights

Nolan Webb

Published July 30, 2026 · Updated August 14, 2026 · 2 min read · 278 views

Nuptial flight records for the far southeastern United States, kept by a group of Florida ant-keepers and pooled into a single chart.

7,620 observations across 161 species, spanning Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and eastern Texas.

Map of the southeastern United States with the eight covered states filled in green — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and eastern Texas. Where eastern Texas stops is a judgment call, not a line on a map.

How to read this

Each record is one day that somebody observed queens or males of a given species.

Not one queen. One day. Ten Camponotus castaneus queens on a single May evening is one record, not ten. The exception is a day so heavy that logging it as a single point would be dishonest, and spring Solenopsis invicta flights do this every year. Those get counted as several.

So the numbers tell you when to go out, not how many queens you will come home with.

The season

June, May and July hold 64% of the chart. December and January together hold under 2%.

Bar chart of nuptial flight records by month, rising from 69 in January to a peak of 1,969 in June and falling to 62 in December

Who flies when

Read this one across, not down.

Each row is shaded against that species' own best month, so a common ant and a scarce one sit on the same footing. The diagonal running down the page is the season itself, from Pheidole megacephala in January to the winter brood of Crematogaster cf. ashmeadi in October.

Heatmap of the 50 most-recorded species across twelve months, forming a diagonal from January at the top to October at the bottom

When they fly

Time of day matters as much as month.

A June evening gets you Camponotus floridanus and nothing that flies at dawn. These groupings come from watching flights rather than from the literature, so treat them as working rules. Sixty-one species still have too few observations to place at all.

Bar chart of species counts by flight window: dawn 32, mid to late morning 22, afternoon 9, dusk to night 42, and 61 not yet classified

Half of every record on the chart belongs to a dusk or after-dark flier. In June it is 53%. Whatever else you do, go out at night.