The ant

📖 In short

The ant is a small, very busy insect that doesn't live alone but in big organized groups called colonies. A single colony can have thousands or even millions of ants, and every ant has a job to do.

🤩 Did you know?

An ant queen lives between 10 and 20 years!
Workers of some big kinds of ants are up to 3.5 centimeters long.
Some ants' nests go down 12 meters underground.
Ants have lived on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 The queen and the workers

Every colony has a queen who lays the eggs, and many workers who gather food, build the nest, care for the young and defend the home. There are also males, whose job is to mate with queens.

🔍 Amazing strength

An ant is very strong for its tiny size, and can carry things dozens of times heavier than itself, as if you carried a car on your head!

💡 Trails of scent

When an ant finds food, it goes back to the nest leaving a trail of special scent behind it. The other ants follow the scent to the food, which is why we see ants walking in a long line.

🎯 Homes underground

Most ants build their nests underground, with lots of rooms and tunnels: rooms for eggs, for food and for the queen. Some ants build their homes in trees out of leaves.