What Do Queen Ants Do?
At first glance, the queen ant's role consists of putting on perfume (pheromones), attracting a mate, digging a burrow and then lying around the rest of her life eating ant bon-bons and laying eggs. This is partly true; the queen is the only ant in her colony to have mated and her main job is to lay eggs. Through complex chemical signals she also directs her colony to ensure the survival of all her children.
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The Facts
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The queen ant's main duty is to lay eggs. Her fertilized eggs will develop into worker ants, soldier ants (a type of worker), and new queens. Any unfertilized eggs will become male ants. She does little to direct the activity of her colony directly, and must remain in a single chamber hidden deep within the colony. She communicates with her colony through pheromones, chemicals produced in her body. These pheromones give her minor control over what happens inside the colony. For example, she can direct what foods the workers give the developing larvae to determine numbers of workers versus new queens. She may decree that workers' eggs should be fed to her daughters as a high-protein meal.
Function
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Laying eggs that will become worker ants is how the colony grows. Unfertilized eggs will become male ants, whose job it is to fertilize other queen ants. Fertilized eggs become workers or new queens, depending on how well the larvae are fed. When weather and seasonal conditions are right, the young queens and the males are sent out to conquer new territory and establish new colonies.
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Types
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Queen ants emit pheromones that inhibit the development of their daughter queens' ovaries. In most species, this keeps a single queen "in charge" of populating the colony. Some species of ant have multiple egg-laying queens within one colony when the new colony is established, but eventually one queen will become dominant. One species of ant, Pristomyrmex pungens, is known to have no queen but has workers who lay all the eggs.
Misconceptions
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Worker ants are not always sterile. The female members of an ant colony all have ovaries; whether they function to produce eggs depends on the species and any pheromone inhibition from the queen. In many species, it is the worker ants who lay the unfertilized eggs that will become male. If the colony loses its queen, the fertilized eggs she laid before she died will still be tended by the worker ants to maturity and a new queen can grow into the role.
Features
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In 2004, Jürgen Liebig and his colleagues at Biozentrum, Universität Würzburg found that the queen ant covers her eggs with a special hydrocarbon pheromone. Any ant in the colony will know this is the queen's egg and take proper care of it, even without direct contact with the queen herself. In the species studied, this compound inhibited worker reproduction. Workers not exposed to queen-laid eggs laid their own eggs. Eggs laid by workers did not have this compound on them and were disposed of when both queen-laid eggs and worker-laid eggs were placed together among the workers.
Considerations
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Worker ants cannot become queens. The fertilization happens at one time only, on the winged queen's nuptial flight, before the colony is established. The queen uses the sperm deposited at that time for all the eggs she will fertilize in her lifetime.
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