How do ants work together? Each ant has six legs and a body with three main parts, and ants live together in big groups called colonies. Some colonies are huge, with thousands to millions of ants, yet almost all the ants you see in a colony are female workers that cannot lay eggs. These workers find food, take care of the young, and build and defend the nest, while the queen is the ant that lays the eggs in a colony and is the largest ant there. Ants range in size from tiny to about an inch long.

A queen ant lays thousands of eggs, and some ant colonies have one queen while others have several. A queen ant can live for several years, but many workers live only a few months. An ant grows from an egg to a larva to a pupa and then to an adult, and from egg to adult it takes about six to ten weeks. A baby ant, called a larva, has no legs and looks like a soft white worm. It cannot feed itself, so adult ants feed and clean it, and worker ants also groom and carry the young inside the nest.

Ants do not see very well, and they find their way mostly by smell and touch, using two antennae to smell and to touch things. They also use scent chemicals called pheromones to warn each other of danger or lead each other to food. When an ant finds food, it lays a scent trail on the way home, and the pheromone makes other ants likely to follow the same path. If a colony is attacked, ants make alarm chemicals that call other workers to help defend the nest. Ants pass messages with smells, touch and vibrations.

When a flood comes, fire ants cling together and float in a group, and a fire ant raft carries the whole colony, with the queen and young in the middle. Some ants can sting, and all ants can bite. A fire ant sting can cause burning, itching and swelling, so stay away from fire ant mounds and from floating rafts of ants. Trouble breathing or a tight chest after a sting means getting medical help right away, and if an ant stings or bites you, tell a grown-up.

Worker ants carry food back to the nest, and some of them can carry 50 times their own body weight. Ants can also carry liquid food in their bodies and share it with nestmates by spitting it up. Leafcutter ants carry leaf pieces to their nest and use them to grow a fungus garden, where small ants chew the leaf pieces into a paste. Leafcutter ants eat only the fungus they grow. Ants eat many different kinds of food, such as nectar, seeds, fungus and insects. Many ants collect honeydew, a sweet liquid made by aphids, to eat. An ant colony can act like one living thing, a superorganism, because its members communicate and cooperate.

Words to know

• colony: big ant group
• larva: baby ant
• antennae: feelers
• pheromones: scent chemicals
• superorganism: one living thing