Cathy Fox, age 10, Florence, South Carolina, for her question:
Do ants have queens like bees?
Ants are rated as social insects because the nest is a family community. A special queen mother lays the eggs but she may not be the only one of her kind in the nest. A honeybee hive has only one ruling queen. A colony of ants may have several queens.
More than 15,000 different ants have been found and classified and in out of the way places, other species are waiting to be identified. Each species has its own way of life and some of their community projects are astounding. There are harvester ants that gather grain and dairy farmers that tend aphids like herds of little cows. There are farmer ants that cultivate crops of fungus plants and army ants that march together in rampaging hordes. Most species build permanent homes of earthy chambers and well organized tunnels. Between marches, the army ants build temporary barracks.
In any case, most members of an ant community are relatives. The colony may include slave ants kidnapped from other nests or other species. But the ruling clan of the community hatches from the eggs of one queen or from other queen ants who may be her daughters. The honeybee queen tolerates no rival queens in her nest. As young queens hatch, she challenges them to mortal combat and only the strongest survive. The queen ant is much more tolerant of rival queens.
An ant nest may be small or an immense structure occupying a region as big as a city block. In early summer, a large number of future queens may hatch, along with larger quotas of workers, drones and perhaps soldier ants destined to guard the nest. The young princesses have wings and so do the princely young drones. On a certain day, these winged ants swarm from the nest and take to the air in a community marriage flight. The drones do not survive. But the mated young queens bite off their gauzy wings and prepare themselves for a settled life of egg laying through the next ten to 15 years.
Many young queens go off alone to start nests of their own. But some return to the old family nest. Some enter neighborhood nests of the same species. These young queens prepare to assist the older queen or queens already in a nest. The worker ants build a special egg laying chamber for a new queen and nursery chambers for her developing eggs, larvae and pupae. The new queen has her own quarters and all the separate queens in the community get along peaceably together.
A young queen who goes off alone has a tougher time starting a new nest of her own. She seals herself in a safe and suitable nesting place and waits for her first small brood to grow up and take over their proper duties. She lives on food stored in her sturdy wing muscles. If she is a farmer ant, she brings a mouthful of fungus threads from the old nest and starts cultivating an underground garden for her future family. But foraging and nest building must wait until her first brood is grown. This may take weeks or even months.