how does the Ants Talk to each to  other?
151792
- Ant communication is primarily through chemicals called pheromones. Because most ants spend their time in direct contact with the ground, these chemical messages are more developed than in other Hymenopterans. So, for instance, when a forager finds food on its way home (found typically through remembered landmarks and the position of the sun), it will leave a trail along the ground, which in a short time other ants will follow. When they return home they will reinforce the trail, bringing other ants, until the food is exhausted, after which the trail is not reinforced and so slowly dissipates. A crushed ant will emit an alarm pheromone, that in high concentration sends other ants nearby into an attack frenzy, and in lower concentration attracts them, while a few ants use what are called propaganda pheromones to confuse their enemies.\n\n- Ant trails have no intrinsic polarity; that is to say, an ant walking on a straight non-branching trail cannot tell whether it is walking to or from the nest. Trails always divide as a "Y", with the two secondary trails at a 60 degree angle to each other, and it is the geometry at trail junctions that give ant trails polarity. (Jackson et al, 2004)\n\n- Like other insects, ants smell with their antennae, which are long and thin. These are fairly mobile, having a distinct elbow joint after an elongated first segment, and since they come in pairs they provide information about direction as well as intensity. Pheromones are also exchanged as compounds mixed in with the food interchanged in trophallaxis, giving the ants information about one another's health and nutrition. Ants can also detect what task group (e.g. foraging or nest maintenance) other ants belong to. Of special note, the queen produces a special pheromone without which the workers will begin raising new queens.\n\n- Ants attack and defend themselves by biting, and in many species, stinging, in both cases sometimes injecting chemicals into the target. Of special note here is formic acid.\n\n- While many types of animals can learn behaviors by imitating other animals, ants may be the only group of animals besides humans in which interactive teaching behavior has been observed. Knowledgeable forager ants of the species Temnothorax albipennis directly lead naive nestmates to newly discovered food sources by an excruciatingly slow (and time-costly), process of 'tandem running'. The follower thereby obtains knowledge that it would not have, had it not been tutored, and this is at the expense of its nestmate teacher. Both leader and follower are acutely sensitive to the progress of their partner. For example, the leader slows down when the follower lags too far behind, and speeds up when the follower gets too close, whereas the follower does the opposite (Franks and Richardson, 2006).\n--------------------
171291
do they act funny around each other? Walk away and spy on them, listen to them talk, or just ask.
145895
Ant says "Hide behind me.."
1001736
Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant or http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant\n\nI don't know whether are you asking about the ratio of physical size, or the ratio of number of them
982229
Ants are neat, and while that other guy was right about 'intelligence' not being a concrete concept, ants certainly can solve very complex problems.  The definitely don't wander around aimlessly and randomly like someone else suggested.  They have  incredible cognitive abilities for navigating from food sources back to their nests.  One of these is known as path integration, ants are able to keep in their memory all the different twists and turns in their path to find food so that when they do find food they can head in a straight line back to their nest.  They are also able to learn the location of different objects in their environment and use these to find their way home if they get off course, like if they get blown away by the wind or something!  When you consider that an ant's brain is smaller than the head of a pin, the amount of information they are able to hold in there and remember and manipulate, is pretty astonishing.  Using electron microscopes and neuroscience techniques, scientists have identified tiny clusters of neurons on the brains of some ants, called mushroom bodies.  They think that these structures are the sites of memory and navigational cognition in the ants. You might also find it cool to know that the navigational systems of ants have formed the basis of the navigational systems developed using artificial intelligence for robots.  And as for the division of labor, I think you are spot on.  Ants (and other eusocial insects) provide the natural world's best examples of self-organising systems and they are way cool and very neat!!!  Science nerds rock-on!
6159
Ants build anthills because that is their home where they keep the queen to make more ants. It is also used for protection against wind, rain and people stomping on it.
360312
Ants are particularly misunderstood.  People like to think they are at least a little intelligent and highly cooperative, but in reality everything they do, all the way down to the determination of which caste they will be in, is government by innate reactions to different chemical pheromones.  They're totally mindless, but have evolved brilliantly, to the point that some species actively wage war on other species and even enslave them.  There is another species that lives in the Far East and builds earthen towers at the entrance of the colony to act as levees during monsoon season.
440822
a black ant, relevant to its size
1135671
No they do not follow the same path. They follow a pheromone trail path set by a forager ant. The ensuing ants will reinforce that path until the food finishes. Yes they know where they are going, as they will also follow the strongest and shortest pheromone trail path.\n\nAlso, through the observation of the sudden infestation of my house with literally hundreds of ants (probably its winter). They find sugar traces in my toilet sink (I was doing some soda and mentos experiment there) :P, and a box of opened cereal at the top of my fridge.\n\nDestroying a path of ants seem to work poorly, as they still continue... they seem to operate much more actively in the day and communicate with other ants with increasing frequency when they are in the trail. Ant poison (chemical but toxic food for ants, which they will feed the queens with) seems to work a few years back and my current batch of ants seem to be taking the bait...
1061854
The big ants guard the workers(the small ones) to keep them on track and protect them.Ibelive the drones attend to the Queen.
59704
Some jumping spiders look and more importantly, smell like ants, and in their disguise, enter the ant's nest (a weaver ant) to devour them and their larvae.
330848
yes, ants have probably the most advanced and elaborate social systems, as well as the most diverse types.  \n\nthe social bees and wasps, such as honeybees or yellowjackets also have fairly complex social systems.\n\nsome types of termites also have very elaborate systems, with genetically determined castes including different sizes of labourers, and even soldier castes with different weaponry for different purposes, as well as the queen, attendants and the king(s).\n\nthere are also some species of aphid that have the beginnings of a eusocial system - with sterile forms that essentially act as workers to help support the other aphids.
440541
yes, actually most species of ants do this.  the winged ants are the queens and reproductive males of the next generation.\n\nthey leave their home nests all at the same time, and have a big royal party in the air.  after they mate, the queens shed their wings, burrow into the ground and start a whole new ant colony - never to fly to again.
680080
All female ants have wings when they hatch. After they hatch, they take a maiden flight where they are met with swarms of male ants. She mates many times, then seeks out a nesting place to make a colony, breaks off her wings, and tunnels underground to start her colony. This is how you tell mated females from unmated females: the unmated females still have their wings.\n\nWhen an ant colony loses their queen, they will sometimes split into two or more colonies. It is not known how or why they select a particular larva, but the drones all begin feeding a single larva a special diet (NOT royal jelly - this is specific to bees, which are related to ants and have similar biology and behavior to ants). This special diet causes the larva to grow larger than others, and become a fully reproductive female (the other "females" in the colony are sterile - same as bees). Once this larva hatches, she mates, breaks off her wings, and becomes the new queen. \n\nIn many cases, several larvae will be fed the diet to become fully reproductive females, but only one will become queen of that colony, the others will go with the rest of the colony if it splits, or they will go on to form their own colony. As someone mentioned above, a queenless colony, on occasion, will meld with another colony that still has a queen. But as far as I understand, it is more common for the queenless colony to raise several new queens that will be dispersed where needed.\n\nThere is a lot of research going on right now with both bees and ants to figure out how this selection of a new quieen occurs and why it is so consistent. Also, how a queen (bee or ant) can mate during one flight in her entire life, yet produce viable eggs for some 20 years or so after...how does the male sperm stay viable within her for that long? This all has yet to be discovered.\n\nBees and ants are just the coolest insects and there's so much we have yet to discover about them!
507418
Ants are always out exploring, and two things happen here:\n\n1. One ant will come across the sugar and will make a trail from there to the colony, soon hordes of ants will follow the trail to bring home the bacon.\n\n2. As long as there is moisture, a nearby and will actually smell the sugar from a few yards away. It does have a smell too. Once he stumbles across it, the same will happen as described earlier.
61725
They mate in large swarms and then females go off to look for a suitable place to start excavating a nest. Soon after matying the males die. Mated females may live and lay fertile eggs for many years after their single mating. Reproductive ants, at the time of mating, are easily told from workers -- they have wings! If you were designing an insect that lives in tunnels underground, would you give them wings? If you are one of the lucky few who watch ants enough, you'll get to see the ant solution to the problem wings impose for digging in the ground.
530182
Ants find their way to food in two different ways. Sometimes a scout simply bumps into a food source. Usually though Ants use their incredibly powerful antenna to detect particles in the air, just like a snakes tongue does. Its very much like smelling. They communicate to the other ants their is food by first laying a trail from the food source back to the nest. They do this almost always in the straightest fashion as possible, even if they have been weaving around for hours. Once back at the nest they convey chemical signals, which gets all the other worker ants (who are all female) to follow her chemical trail to the food. The combine brain power of a colony of ants is equal to a single human. And although no one ant is telling them what to do, each ant knows its job.