Queen ants live as long as their colonies. Which dies first the colony or the queen?

This is a tricky question since some species of ants have multiple queens. Let's consider colonies with only one queen first. It's a close tie. Sometimes one way; sometimes the other.

Young colonies often hit hard times and all worker ants die. The queen dies soon thereafter. For older colonies, however, the reverse may happen- the queen dies first. Then the colony dies within a few months if the workers are in poor health, or up to a couple of years later if they're healthy.

Before a new queen can found a colony, she must mate. This induces her to cast off her wings.

The young queen starts by making a nest. She digs a chamber under shelter-perhaps a stone or tree bark. For some small ant species, as the queen gets her first brood going, she leaves the nest occasionally to forage for food. When the brood gets old enough to function as worker ants, they take over these jobs and she only lay eggs as long  as she lives-perhaps 20 years or more.

However, when starting new colonies, most queen ants don't leave the nest to scrounge food. Instead, they live off the food reserves in the now useless wing muscles.

Special cases: The Lasius species in Niger is strange. When the queen dies, the worker ants produce eggs. Stranger: They produce clones.

Ant life gets complicated when the colony has more than a single queen. Although we know of many such species, we haven't studied them well enough to know behaviour details-such as, which dies first: the colony or queen(s). Certainly, with many queens to lay eggs, the queen is replaceable.

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