Wildlife Spotting

True queens do fly, briefly, but I've only ever seen winged males, and sometimes in nearly plague numbers just after a hatching. Lucky you to have caught sight of a queen outside a nest.

Lori, There are so many species of ants, probably no one is familiar with all of them and my knowledge is quite limited in scope. I tried to figure out the size of this ant based on its surroundings, which look like a window or door sill of some sort, hence my question about size. If it is on a sill, this is a fairly large ant. Carpenter ants are large and common in the area where the spotting occurred so I'm making some assumptions as to the common name, which covers several species. Carpenter ants, however, have nuptial flights in which both males and females participate and both are winged. I've photographed queens, for instance, in Colorado last summer pulling off their own wings after having mated and as they begin their search for a suitable nest site. For more information, Wikipedia has an interesting article on the formicine ants at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant. Page down to "Development and Reproduction." Ants are fascinating insects and well worth discussing. Personally, I think this is a very cool sighting...grin.

Only male ants have wings, as a way of getting to a new ant hill. A queen will produce a bath of drones (males) and once they are fully grown they will all fly away. When they arrive at another hill, the wings fall off. If there was no way for the males to find other colonies and mate with unrelated queens, ants would become terribly inbred.

I'm not sure if it is a male or female, but for my own education is there something that you see that indicates that it's a male?

Ant for sure, but I suspect that it is a winged male

It's an ant. Depending upon the size, I'd suggest that this is a carpenter ant queen. Was it about 1.5 and 2 centimeters long?