You searched for: “ants
ants
1. A colony of ants.
2. A union of carpenter ants.
3. A picnic of ants.
4. An army of ants.
5. A swarm of ants.
This entry is located in the following unit: Venereal Terms: Names of Groups (page 1)
formicine, myrmicine: ants
Of, or of the nature of, ants.
myrmecocole (verb), myrmecocoles; myrmecocoled; myrmecocoling: ants
Living in ant or termite nests.
ponerine: ants
1. Of, or pertaining to, or designating ants of the subfamily Ponerin, which includes mainly tropical species.
2. A ponerine ant.
This entry is located in the following unit: -ine (page 15)
More possibly related word entries
Units related to: “ants
(Latin: a suffix; a person who, the thing which; people who, things which)
Word Entries containing the term: “ants
Myrmecocystus, sac ants
One of five genera worldwide containing honey ants.

Honey ants develop specialized workers, called repletes or honey pots, that store nectar within balloon-like abdomens swollen to a centimeter or more in diameter.

When a colony needs food, the repletes regurgitate their reserves to their normally-proportioned sisters.

All live in dry habitats and have polymorphic or variably-sized workers. In most polymorphic ants, the larger workers serve as colony defenders, but in honey ants they become repletes.

Ants that are Living Honey Pots for their Hive Members

Honey ants survive from late fall until early summer by storing liquid food; not in hives or holes, but in the bodies of special workers.

These living storage tanks are fed to the bursting point by their fellow hive members and with their sacs fully swollen, the ants become immobile, never to walk again. Sometimes they get so much honey that they burst.

At night, the colony workers scurry forth from their nests to harvest sweet honeydew from galls, or globular swellings, on the twigs of nearby shin oaks.

Tiny cynipid wasps make the galls by laying eggs in the twigs and as the young wasps develop inside the plant tissues they irritate the plant tissue to the point of causing malformations.

Inside the galls, sugars are produced and the excess is secreted onto the outside surfaces in small droplets, and this nectar is what attracts the honey ants.

The worker ants move from one gall to another and as time passes, their abdomens slowly become swollen with honeydew. Like many others of its family, every honey ant has a community, or pantry, stomach in which food may be stored and then regurgitated to feed fellow members of the colony.

Some of the other foraging members of the hive go to wild rosebushes and find a second source of honey ant food where they "milk" a herd of aphids, or plant lice, from whom honey-dew is secreted by special glands on these "ant cows" which is collected by most sweet-eating ants.

Swollen "Repletes" Stay in the Hive

Back in the nest, the honeydew is regurgitated from the crops of the foragers and drunk by chosen workers. After awhile, the abdomens of these living casks become so distended that the ants can no longer move about in a normal fashion, instead they remain suspended from the arched ceilings of the subterranean chambers by the tiny claws on their feet.

These individuals are called "repletes" and once they have embarked upon their careers as community reservoirs, they never leave the nest again. Like clusters of small glossy grapes, they remain suspended month after month in total darkness and as many as 300 repletes may dangle from the ceilings in a colony's galleries.

Every so often, in the dry season, a hungry worker ant approaches a replete and solicits food by placing her mouth against that of the replete and a droplet passes between them. The worker may also pass the honey on to other laborers of the colony, to the queen, or to immature ants.

Biologists believe a replete lives about two years and when it dies, it is usually dismembered and carried off to a "cemetery chamber".

—Compiled from "Living Honey Jars of the Ant World"
by Ross E. Hutchins, Ph.D; National Geographic;
March, 1962; pages 405-411.
This entry is located in the following unit: myrmeco-, myrmec-, myrme-, myrmic-, myrmi- + (page 2)
myrmicine: stinging ants
1. Like, or pertaining to, ants.
2. Of or belonging to the sub-family Myrmicinae of stinging ants.
This entry is located in the following units: -ine (page 12) myrmeco-, myrmec-, myrme-, myrmic-, myrmi- + (page 3)
Word Entries at Get Words: “ants
ant (s) (noun), ants (pl)
A social insect living in an organized colony: Ants are characteristically the males and fertile queen that have wings during breeding season while wingless sterile females are the workers.

Ants run much of the terrestrial world as soil turners, channelers of energy, dominatrics of the insect fauna and yet receive only passing mention in textbooks on ecology.

They employ the most complex forms of chemical communication of any animals and their social organization provides an illuminating contrast to that of human beings, but not one biologist in a hundred can describe the life cycle of any species.

Ants are classified as a single family, the Formicidae, within the order Hymenoptera, which also includes the bees, wasps, sawflies, ichneumons (order of parasitic wasps whose larvae feed on other live insect larvae), and similar forms.

—Compiled excerpts from
The Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson;
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press;
Cambridge, Massachusetts; 1990; pages 1-3.
This entry is located in the following unit: Ant and Related Entomology Terms (page 2)
(terms restricted to the study of social insects; such as, ants and words that apply generally to entomology)
(insects that live in colonies which, in some ways, resemble human cities are ants, bees, wasps, hornets, and termites)
Word Entries at Get Words containing the term: “ants
army ant, legionary ant (s) (noun); army ants; legionary ants (pl)
A member of an ant species that shows both nomadic and group-predatory behavior: In other words, the nest site of army ants is changed at relatively frequent intervals, in some cases daily, and the workers forage in groups.

This entry is located in the following unit: Ant and Related Entomology Terms (page 3)
Azteca ant (s) (noun), Azteca ants (pl)
An ant that lives only in the hollow stems of cecropia trees, an example of an ant-plant association: The Azteca ants are aggressive and are especially active at the tips of growing branches, but they lack the painful bites or effective stings characteristic of other Amazon ants like army ants or fire ants.

The Azteca ants feed off protein-rich secretions, necessary in their diet, that are produced by special glands at the base of the leaves.

Azteca ants do not sting, but they do bite, and will fiercely protect the tree from potential dangers, for example, they attack other insects that land on the tree and drive them away.

They will cut and kill any vines that begin to climb up the tree, whereas many other trees in the rain forest will be covered in epiphytes or dripping with vines, cecropia trees are generally epiphyte-free and vine-free.

These actions of the Azteca ants allow the cecropia tree to stay healthy, grow as fast as possible, and successfully compete with other trees for limited sunlight. In return, the tree provides the protecting ant with a place to live and a source of food.


—Compiled from information located at
The Ant Realm by Ross F Hutchins; Dodd, Mead & Company;
New York; 1967; pages 144-145; 151-154.
This entry is located in the following unit: Ant and Related Entomology Terms (page 4)
harvester ants and vegetation
There is general agreement among students of ant ecology that harvesters strongly alter the abundance and local distribution of flowering plants; especially, in deserts, grasslands, and other xeric (dry) habitats where the ants are most abundant.
This entry is located in the following unit: Ant and Related Entomology Terms (page 8)
harvesting ants
An ant species that feed substantially on seeds and store them in their nests.
This entry is located in the following unit: Ant and Related Entomology Terms (page 8)
Social Insects, Especially Ants

Primarily dealing with the topic of ants which live in colonies or "cities".

This entry is located in the following unit: Index or Menu of Various Topics (page 2)
weaver ants
Species of ants; such as, members of the genus Oecophylla, that use larval silk in construction of their nests.
This entry is located in the following unit: Ant and Related Entomology Terms (page 24)