a supercolony of Formica yessensis... was reported... to extend across 270 hectares of the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. It contains an estimated 306 million workers and 1 million queens, which live in 45,000 interconnected nests.

queens of the leafcutter ants of South and Central America each give birth to as many as 150 million workers, of which 2 to 3 million are alive at any given time. African driver-ant queens... may produce twice that number, a mass of daughters exceeding the human population of the United States

Adult ants cannot chew and swallow solid food. Instead they swallow the juice which they squeeze from pieces of food. They throw away the dry part that is left over ... The abdomen of the ant contains two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants.

Some kinds of ants are quite aggressive in protecting their nest or food resources. The enemy sometimes may be an ant of the same species and sometimes of a different ant species. The fight is continued until the enemy's body is dismembered or it dies.

The European species of Formica exsecta seek to colonize other species of the Formica genus. The exsecta queen is smaller than other predatory species ...and thus tends to be treated with less hostility by the host workers. 'Queens approached by the host workers lie down and 'play dead' by pulling their appendages into the body in the pupal posture. In this position they are picked up by the host workers and carried down into the nests without any outward show of hostility. Later they somehow manage to eliminate the host queen and take over the reproductive role'

worker ants tend to take greater risks as they get older. Scientists have shown that this behavioural trait benefits the colony because certain risky activities, such as foraging far from the nest, are best done by ants coming to the end of their useful lives – it doesn't pay to put young workers in high-risk jobs.
As a result, younger ants tend to do housekeeping chores around the nest, which is inherently safer than travelling further afield.

Queens of some species of the genus Formica are known to live longer than 15 years.

Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight. An ant brain has about 250 000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human.

Ants of the Polyergus samurai species only work when they raid the nests of Formica japonica. This is done so that at all other times, Polyergus samurai ants do not need to work: instead, they force their slaves, worker ants of the Formica japonica species, to work for them.

It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.

In evolutionary terms, worker ants are the supreme altruists because they dedicate their lives to bringing up the offspring of another individual – their queen – while remaining sterile themselves. This is also true of many other social insects, which perplexed Charles Darwin and generations of biologists who came after him because it appeared to contradict the central idea of evolution – leaving behind as many of your own offspring as possible.

* There are more than 12,000 different species of ant, ranging in size from 2mm to 25mm (about an inch).
* African driver ants are so vicious they have been known to kill humans. Although cases are rare, babies or already unconscious adults are occasionally found killed by the creatures, which attack in swarms of up to 100,000.