![]() ![]() They are born in the colony and never have to travel vast distances to remote locations. During the course of evolution they’ve sacrificed their ability to spawn their own offsprings. The colony hero, the worker, is the winner by numbers. This makes it very difficult to tell their species, because many males look the same. ![]() Males are almost always darkly coloured, independent of other castes color schemes. ![]() The males can not survive another year in the hopes of a new generation of females taking flight. By then, the females are either dead or beneath the ground, founding their new colonies. But unfortunately, in the ant world, there is no life for a male ant after mating. If they’re lucky they can survive for a few days. When the big day comes the males dies off within the hour after mating. Their mission in life is not to contribute to the colony, but to mate with as many females as possible. Most of the time, they do not perform any of the colony duties, but rather bides their time waiting for the nuptial flights. The males are born in the nest and after birth start wandering around it. These are always visible even though they might be hard for us to spot. They also have flaps underneath belonging to their sexual organs. The difference in body type from the queen is that the males’ abdomens are quite slender. Much like the queens, males have large wings and a larger bodies than the worker ants. There is no rule connected to here status as a queen, it is simply something we’ve created to understand the structure of their societies. But the fact is that she is only there for one thing: laying eggs. It might seem like a classy thing, being the queen and all. To begin with, the segments lay side by side, touching each other, but are with time separated more and more. It is made out of four to five segments, connected by a thin but stretchable material. The queens also have a big elastic abdomen which will grow with the rate of her egg-laying. When mated and about to found her colony, she bites of her wings (or rather snaps them off with her legs), simply because she won’t need them anymore. These are accompanied by a large thorax, a result of the large wing muscles being located there. Because the workers do not lay any eggs of their own, the queen becomes the most important ant in the colony.Īnt queens are born with large wings. Though from an evolutionary perspective, this isn’t an act of love – rather a way of maximising the possible spreading of their genes. She is the mother of all the workers and protected to the teeth by her children. All the work being done is to make sure her egg-laying can go on. The queen is the focal point of the colony. While some ant species only have one queen (monogyne) there are species whose colonies might consist of several (polygyne). ![]()
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January 2023
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