ANTSTORE World of Ants

[Alexismomo]

When young, i was curious about how the ants can fly?

Does it grow from the normal one without wings to this?

[Lewis]

They are young queens and males also known as alates produced by the founding queen when the colony is at a certain size. They fly from the nest to mate in the spring and summer depending on the species. Then the male will usually die within a few days of mating and the queens will shed their wings after mating and found a new colony.

Lewis

[baumarkthammer]

Ants are not the type of insect that can grow when in the form of a "adult".
The ant larvae are the stadium in which the ant grows, normally it has about 4 stadiums I think and skins at the end of every of it. The last skin is the one the pupae loses when hetching to a full grown worker, queen or male. All the workers are of female gender but in most species they aren´t able to reproduce. Only the queens, like the one in your picture, can normally reproduce (a exception is for example Messor capitatus or Diacamma spp.). They are already born as queens when the egg is layed or the larvae gets special treatment when growing that can be more food like in the species of Myrmica rubra (I think it is called red imported ant in the USA). But it can also happen on the genetic way or with pheromons. The adult ant, the imagine is the finished form and does not skin anymore, does not grow and can´t regenerate body parts.

So the flying ants, or alates as Lewis said, can never grow from a worker when talking about ants. However when talking about termites, which aren´t related to ants very close, there are many species in which the reproductive can grow from a worker or a so called nymph. The differenc is that termites hatch from their eggs as nymphs and not as larvae so that termites are able to walk on their own and even work. Then later they skin and can even reach the level of a reproductive. But those reproductives don´t fly, the flying reproductives of termites are born in a similar way, too.

It is not that hard to explain how the alates can fly; The very big thorax of most of the alates contains a hige amount of muscles and is build completley different from the thorax (the middle part) of a worker. That is because ants evolved from wesps, the queens still have the huge amount of muscles. However later the queen bites the wings off, normally when mated with a male and is unable to fly. The males die after mating.