The alliance of two or more queens during colony founding is a widespread, but still far from universal habit for some ants.

In the honeypot, the Myrmecocystus mimicus queens are strongly attracted to each other after they have mated, and the pleometrosis is enhanced further by the queens' tendency to start nests in close proximity.

Although pleometrosis is very common among ants, it seldom leads smoothly to polygyny. In most cases, multiple queens are reduced to a single egg-laying queen, at least within local areas of the nest, shortly after the first brood of workers emerge as an adult from a pupal case or a larva from an egg.

The workers eliminate the supernumerary queens or the queens fight among themselves and are reduced further by worker aggression, or the queens begin to fight and disperse to different parts of the nest, creating a condition of oligogyny (presence of a few queens within a single colony).