So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony.

So this is the kind of rule that, as the colony develops and gets older and larger, will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one.

It's not due to the experience of older, wiser ants.

The first is that the experience of the ant of each ant can't be very predictable.

Ants never make more ants colonies make more colonies.

Ants are a classic example workers work for queens and queens work for workers.

She lays eggs, she feeds the larvae so an ant starts as an egg, then it's a larva.

Now ants most ants, including these, don't see very well.

And it stays that size until the queen dies and there's nobody to make more ants, when she's about 15 or 20 years old.

So it starts out with zero ants, just the founding queen, and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five.

Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older.

And when we dig up nests we find they're about as deep as the colony is wide, so about a meter deep for the big old nests.

So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants.

No ant directs the behavior of any other ant.

And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants.

When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony specific odor.

How is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change?

But in a small colony, it's likely to meet fewer foragers, just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet.

And these four groups are just the ants outside the nest.

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Dimethyl ether

And they do that by each year sending out the reproductives those are the ones with wings on a mating flight.

So this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer.

The nest maintenance workers become foragers.

And the nest maintenance workers do that inside the nest, and then they come out of the nest carrying bits of dry soil in their mandibles.

Then, as soon as the ants the first group of ants emerge, they're larvae. Then they're pupae. Then they come out as adult ants.

Whereas the young, small colonies the two year old colonies of just 2,000 ants are much more variable.

And I thought, These ants, are they looking for the queen ant?

This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance.

Ant

Formic Acid

The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like I expect to meet another forager every three seconds.

And they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside.

Like I just said, if there is more food to collect, the patrollers, the midden workers, the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage.

Does it matter to the foragers what the nest maintenance workers are doing?

Does it matter to the midden workers what the patrollers are doing?

Each ant, then, as it comes back in, is contacting other ants.

There are nest maintenance workers working throughout the nest.

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