Amazing Ants

Ants are really amazing animals, and some kinds of ants do really amazing things!

There are three kinds of ants in a colony: workers, queens, and drones. The workers are all female, and each one has a different job to do to keep the colony running. Drones are males. They have wings, and their only job is to fly to other colonies to mate with queens. The queen is the mother of the hive: she lays the eggs that hatch into new ants!

It’s hard to say what the lifespan of an ant is, because each kind of ant is different. But one thing is for sure: the queen lives much longer than the workers! She’s usually a lot larger, and while worker ants live anywhere from 2 months to a year, some queen can live to be more that 10 years old!

Some kinds of ants do things that no other kind of ants can do:

• Weaver ants collect leaves and make a nest by picking up a baby ant in their jaws and using the silk the baby produces to sew the edges of the leaves together.
• Leafcutter ants are farmers! They cut pieces of leaves and bring them back to their nest to make compost. They eat the fungus that grows in it!
• Honeypot ants stick some of their sisters to the ceiling and stuff them so full of nectar that their bodies swell up like balloons. When they’re hungry, they go and take a drink of nectar from their sister’s mouth!