The life cycle of an ant colony

How a single mated queen becomes a whole colony — every stage of the ant life cycle, from the mating flight to a mature superorganism.

Maiden flight

She has just mated in mid-air and is dropping to the ground. A queen mates only during this single flight — she will never mate again, yet may lay fertilised eggs for years from it.

• A queen stores a lifetime of sperm from this one flight, fertilising every worker egg she ever lays.

Shedding wings

Safely down, she tears off her four wings — she will never need them again. The big muscles that powered them are now dead weight, so her body dissolves them into energy and protein for her first brood.

• Shedding the wings is called dealation.
• Her flight muscles are literally recycled into her first eggs and larvae.

Digging in

She sinks a narrow shaft and hollows out a small chamber, then plugs the entrance from the inside. From here until her first workers emerge, she is sealed in and completely alone.

• Carpenter ants don’t eat wood — they only carve it out to make galleries.

Sealed in

Walled in with no way out, she will neither eat nor forage. Everything her first brood needs comes from her own body — stored fat and her dissolved wing muscles. This is “claustral” founding.

• She is gambling her whole body: if her reserves run out before the first workers can forage, the colony fails.

First eggs

She lays her first small clutch — typically 6–14 eggs — and tends them constantly, licking them clean to keep mould and bacteria at bay.

• Ant eggs are sticky, so she can keep the whole clutch bundled in one tidy pile.

Tending brood

Egg to worker takes about 6–10 weeks. Eggs hatch into legless grubs (larvae) that she feeds from her own saliva; a mature larva spins a silk cocoon and pupates inside it.

• Carpenter ants spin cocoons — those tan capsules are pupae, not eggs.
• She feeds larvae mouth-to-mouth, and even lays special “trophic” eggs purely for them to eat.

First workers

Her first daughters chew their way out of their cocoons — often with her help. These first workers are “nanitics”: dwarfs, far smaller than normal workers, because she raised them on a shoestring.

• Fresh workers are pale and soft (“callow”) and darken to chestnut over a few days.
• Nanitics can be half the size of later workers, or smaller.

Opening up

The new workers break open the sealed entrance and step outside for the first time. Food finally flows in from the world, and the queen can stop living off her own body.

• From now on the queen mostly just lays eggs — her daughters do all the rest.

Growing

With foragers bringing food home, the colony grows on an accelerating curve: more workers raise more brood, which become yet more workers.

• Colony growth is roughly logistic — slow at first, then fast, then leveling off near its natural size.

Mature

A full-strength colony. The queen may keep laying for many years, with hundreds or thousands of workers depending on the species.

• Some ant queens live 15–30 years — among the longest-lived insects known.

Raising alates

When the colony is strong and well-fed, it invests in the future: winged virgin queens and males (alates), reared to fly off and found colonies of their own.

• Males do little but fly and mate, and die soon after the nuptial flight.

Nuptial flight

On the right warm, humid day, the alates pour out and take to the air to mate — the very flight this colony’s own queen once made.

• Many colonies across a region fly on the same day, so the swarms mix and inbreeding is avoided.

Senescence

As the queen ages, she lays fewer and fewer eggs. Without a successor, the colony slowly dwindles.

• A colony usually dies with its queen — workers cannot be replaced once she is gone.

Requeening

A daughter queen is reared to take over from the failing one, in species that tolerate it.

• Most ant species can’t requeen — the founding queen is irreplaceable.

▶ Watch the live colony simulation