This allows the ants to stay under water for a long time. The “brain” (upper throat ganglion) in female workers is larger in accordance with their diverse tasks and memory abilities. Physique and internal organs The fascination of queen ants.

Queen Ant and Workers Ant

Boxes are animals of the same sex, but with differences in structure and function.

There are two different types of females in an ant colony: the queen ants and the workers.

The main differences are in body size, wings and the formation of the ovaries. The queens are usually much larger than the workers, their chest is barrel or ball-shaped and thus offers space for the wing muscles.

The young queens throw their wings off at a “predetermined breaking point” after the wedding flight. Workers are basically wingless. The ovaries in queen ants are fully functional and well developed. This is visible in comparison to the workers in that the queens have a larger abdomen. The queen ants only job is to lay eggs. Love to read in hindi. Then read ant in hindi

Workers are sterile females, they have underdeveloped ovaries and are usually unable to lay eggs. The workers can differ in size. This is related to different diets.

In some species there are also morphological differences in connection with special activities, such as soldiers with large heads with particularly strong mandibles for defense or porters with large round heads to close the entrances, such as the door or piston head ant, a wood ant in warmer areas lives in branches, or as in the honey ants’ storage animals in Mexico, which take up large amounts of food and thus hang motionless on the ceiling for months.

Males are usually almost as big as the queen ants with wings and mostly larger eyes. Depending on the species, they only appear at certain times of the year and their only task is to ensure that the young queens mate. Then they die.

Ant species from four subfamilies occur in Central Europe. The ants that are best known in Germany, such as road ants, meadow ants and wood ants, belong to the species-rich subfamily of scale ants, which can be recognized by the fact that the stalk member forms a flat, upright scale between the chest and abdomen. The name of the subfamily of knot ants, which is also rich in species, indicates that the abdomen stalk consists of two knot-shaped links. The other two subfamilies are hardly represented in Germany. The four subfamilies on the left at a glance:

The main differences can be found:

• In the case of the “stalk” (Petiolus), which in most native species consists of only one limb and is differently shaped, only in the case of the knot ants has two limbs that look like a knot is only present in knotty ants and stinging ants, in the others it was partially or completely reduced.

• The sting apparatus works in connection with a poison gland as a poison sting, the sting kills smaller prey, for humans it is painful. The other ants bite a wound with their sharp mandibles as a weapon for attack and defense, bend the tip of the abdomen between their legs and inject poison into it. With them this consists mainly of formic acid, with the others mainly of aromatic compounds. The behavior of our wood ants can be easily triggered by holding a finger over them.

• The number of abdominal segments.The sex animals are responsible for reproduction. Mating usually takes place during the wedding flight – only once in the life of a queen ant, sometimes over 20 years. The males die after copulation and are mostly food for ant colonies or birds. The sperm ingested by the queen end up in a semen pouch and remain capable of fertilization throughout a queen’s life. The laying period lasts from spring to autumn.

Laying Eggs

The queen of the little red wood ant lays around 300 eggs a day, 50,000 a year and 1 million in her lifetime. Males always develop from unfertilized eggs, and female sex animals and workers from fertilized eggs.

The corresponding development depends mainly on the “procurement of the egg”, the type and amount of larval food, “winter or summer eggs” and the temperature. Like all hymenoptera, ants go through a complete transformation – from the egg to larval stages, through the pupal stage to the fully developed insect.

The eggs are transparent to white and usually stuck together in egg packets. This facilitates the transport to the chambers with the most favorable temperature and humidity. The larvae are white, blind, legless, sack-shaped like maggots and are fed, licked and transported to appropriately tempered rooms by the workers.

Licking is not only used for cleaning: the larvae evidently give off a secretion as an incentive for care. Workers also often help the larvae with spinning by holding out stones as sticky points. While the pupa is resting, the “conversion” to the ant imago takes place. In primeval ants and scale ants, pupae are always surrounded by cocoons (parchment-like in scale ants, they are often referred to as “ant eggs”), there is no cocoon in nodal and glandular ants. The development time from egg to imago differs depending on the species, with wood ants it is 5 – 6 weeks, with Lasius species, however, e.g. the larvae from which sex animals arise.