Ant colony in Sikkim: industrious insects at work

From the archive record

Close up of an Ant Colony in Sikkim. An ant colony, also called a formicary is the basic family unit around which ants organize their lifecycle.Ant colonies are eusocial, and are very much like those found in other social Hymenoptera, though the various groups of these developed sociality independently through convergent evolution.[citation needed] The typical colony consists of one or more egg-laying queens, a large number of sterile females ("workers") and, seasonally, a large number of winged sexual males and females.[citation needed] Periodically, swarms of the winged sexuals (known as alates) depart the nest in great nuptial flights. The males die shortly thereafter, along with most of the females.[citation needed] A small percentage of the females survive to initiate new nests. This