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
Red imported fire ant production of sexuals through pheromones that influence the behaviours of workers toward both male and female larvae. There are two forms of society in the red imported fire ant: polygynous colonies and monogynous colonies. Polygynous colonies differ substantially from monogynous colonies in social insects. The former experience reductions in queen fecundity, dispersal, longevity, and nestmate relatedness. Polygynous queens are also less physogastric than monogynous queens and workers are smaller. Understanding the mechanisms behind queen recruitment is integral to understanding how these differences in fitness are formed. It is unusual that the number of older queens in a colony does not