Samuel Kaplan, age 9, of Pittsburgh, Pa., for his question:
Are flying ants the same as crawling ants?
Flocks of flying ants appear on a certain summer day. They are the brothers and sisters of the little crawling ants that live in a nest on the ground. One throng of the flying ants came from this very nest. Other cloudy throngs came from nests of crawling ants across the meadow.
A busy ant nest is a big family of brothers and sisters. It is, you might say, a royal family because the mother of all these ants is the queen. The nest may have one or three queen or two/and the queen mother ants lay ail the eggs. The eggs hatch into hungry little grubs. Later the 'grubs spin milky white cocoons around themselves and go to sleep. When they wake up they crawl out of their blankets.
At last they are grown up ants but not all of them are exactly alike. Each new grown up has six legs, a very thin neck and a very thin waist. But some are bigger than others and some of them have wings. Most of them are worker ants. They are the helpful housekeepers and the busy babysitters of the nest. The workers are little princesses, but none of them will become queens or lay eggs and have baby ants of their own.
Most of the winged ants are princes or drones. Their only duty in life is to marry a queen. A few of the young, winged ants are queens, and most of them want to leave home to start an ant nest of their very own. The new nests should be across the meadow so there plenty of room for hunting to feed the hungry family. The queens need wings to travel the distance from the old nest and naturally they need husbands with wings to fly away with the.
The fly away day is calm and sunny. The young queens and dozens of drone princes scramble from the nest and crawl up onto the stones and twigs. Then they spread their gauzy wings and take off into the air. Some groups throng in the sunshine like dusky clouds. some settle around treetops. There is surf to be at least one queen in each group for this is a marriage flight with all the flutter and excitement you would expect at a royal wedding.
A queen may marry several of her drone princes. But after the wedding the drones drop one by one to the ground and soon perish. The young queen flies off to start a new home. When she settles on the right spot, she breaks off her gauzy wings and lays a few eggs. They will become the first workers of the new ant nest.
A fly away day happens one to three times a year. On the same day, other wedding parties leave from nests nearby. These are first cousins that started new homes from the same nest maybe last year. After a marriage flight, there are no winged queens left in the nest and no winged drones. Most of the time, the queen and the wingless workers have the nest to themselves and the queen mother sheds her wins after her royal wedding.