Fire ant queens. Even if only one queen survives, within a month or so, the colony can expand to thousands of individuals. Some colonies may be polygynous (having multiple queens per nest). Fire ants are resilient and can survive floods. During Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017, clumps of fire ants, known as rafts, were seen clumped together on the surface of the water. Each clump had as many as 100,000 individual ants, which formed a temporary structure until finding a new permanent home. Fire ant queens, the reproductive females in their colony, also are generally the largest. Their primary function is
Ant colony as souvenirs. Usually, the hills are chosen after the ants have abandoned as to not kill any ants; however in the Southeast United States, pouring into an active colony of invasive fire ants is a novel way to eliminate them. An "ant-hill", in its simplest form, is a pile of earth, sand, pine needles, manure, urine, or clay or a composite of these and other materials that build up at the entrances of the subterranean dwellings of ant colonies as they are excavated. A colony is built and maintained by legions of worker ants, who carry tiny bits of dirt