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
Queen ant Queen ant A queen ant (formally known as a gyne) is an adult, reproducing ant in an ant colony; generally she will be the mother of all the other ants in that colony. Some female ants, such as "Catagly", do not need to mate to produce offspring, reproducing through asexual parthenogenesis or cloning, and all of those offspring will be female. Others, like those in the genus "Crematogaster", mate in a nuptial flight. Queen offspring develop from larvae specially fed in order to become sexually mature among most species. Depending on the species, there can be either a single mother