These ants can switch from worker to queen and back again, but when they revert back from queen to worker they lose their life-extending benefits, returning to the short seven-month worker lifespan.

A mighty struggle for ultimate power, with calls of "death to the queen" answered by armies of workers, is routine in some ant colonies.

Much like humans, social insects such as ants and bees behave differently when their mother is not around. Workers are thought to perceive the presence of their mother queen using her unique ...

The black garden queen ant (Lasius niger) ensures colony survival by laying thousands of eggs after a single mating. Her diet, including honeydew, insects, and sometimes her own infected larvae ...

Is an Ant Colony's Caste System Determined by Epigenetics? Discover how long-living queen ants thrive through unique epigenetic changes affecting their gene expression and social behavior.

Researchers looked at the laval M. triviale queen ant under a microscope, and found her covered in 37 doorknob-like lumps. Nobody knows why.

But one Mediterranean ant species takes royal work to the extreme: The worker ants use their mandibles to haul their young queen to faraway nests so she can mate, according to new research.

Leptothorax acervorum ants' reproductive strategy depends on habitat. Colonies are functionally monogynous (only one queen reproduces) on sun-exposed slopes in Alaska, Hokkaido and the mountains ...

Queen ants, for their part, settle for just a single sexual encounter, storing all the sperm they'll ever need in a special sac. After she is fertilized, a queen settles into a life of procreation.

Whether fire ants bow to one queen or accept many rulers depends on one long strand of genes, a new study finds. The gene sequence is the first "social chromosome" ever discovered, according to ...