DISCOVER THE CASTES OF ANTS AND THEIR FUNCTIONS

[@Liam.caliber]

So the queen is the mother of all the ants and her job is to reproduce with them? How does the colony not get mutated?

[@VainaDeHormigas]

Hello, dear colleague Liam.caliber, I will give you my personal opinion. In the case of the queen, she is already fertilized before creating her own colony. The queen is capable of laying unfertilized fertile eggs throughout her life, which will give rise to workers and soldiers. At a certain time, the queen ant lays special eggs (mediated by hormones), although in appearance they are the same as the rest. These eggs are special because they contain the future queens and males. At this point, it is important to highlight that the females are diploid individuals and the males are haploid (normal number of chromosomes for the species). This is so, because only the eggs that will produce males are fertilized. Now we know where ants are born. But, how could these eggs have been fertilized if there are no males in an ant colony? The answer is when the female had her nuptial flight and could be fertilized. A female can copulate with one or several males, depending on the species. Fertilization of ants is internal, the male introduces the sperm inside the female and she will store it in a spermatheca until it must be used for the new generation of fertile ants. Remembering that in nuptial flights the females can be fertilized by males from other ant colonies that meet in the air or space that nuptial flight happens. I hope that although the answer is long, it has been efficient.