On the first really hot day of spring Camponotus have their mating flights. Today we collected C. fellah from the population that lives on campus in the Weizmann Institute (because that’s where samples for GAGA reference genome sequencing were collected). With the help of Ofer Feinrman and his group we managed to collect very large numbers of males from multiple colonies. We have more than 100 males from a single large colony, which is ideal for our purpose – genomic map construction (as part of our BSF project). The samples will be processed for DNA extraction and RAD-seq library construction by our robot Noah. The sequencing data will be used for genotype calling and linkage map construction. Here are some photos, taken by Pnina obviously: