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.

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.

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

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.

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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Then the nest maintenance workers work inside the nest, and I wanted to say that the nests look a lot like Bill Lishman's house.

And the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip, are contacting the ants coming in.

They all live in colonies consisting of one or a few queens, and then all the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers.

And then this is how colony size and numbers of worker ants changes so this is about 10,000 worker ants changes as a function of colony age, in years.

And in harvester ants, I divide the tasks of the ants I see just outside the nest into these four categories where an ant is foraging, when it's out along the foraging trail, searching for food or bringing food back.

The queen just lays the eggs. There's no management.