A Colony of Ants cartoon showing a cutaway underground ant colony with rooms for the queen, nursery, food storage, construction, security, catering, and clean-up crews.

A Colony of Ants

by
A Colony of Ants cartoon showing a cutaway underground ant colony with rooms for the queen, nursery, food storage, construction, security, catering, and clean-up crews.
A group of ants is also called a colony.

What Does “A Colony of Ants” Mean?

“Colony” is the standard biological term for an ant group, and unlike some of the more whimsical entries on this site, it’s genuinely precise: a colony is every ant descended from, and still serving, a single queen (or in some species, several queens). Together they function as a eusocial superorganism, a single biological unit made of thousands or even millions of individual bodies, each performing a specialized role — nursing larvae, foraging, building, or defending the nest.

Colony sizes vary enormously by species, from a few dozen ants to the record-holding Argentine ant “supercolonies” that stretch across continents, made up of billions of individuals that don’t fight each other despite living hundreds of miles apart.

Example: “The whole colony of ants sprang into action the moment the nest was disturbed.”

Related: Collective Nouns for Insects · What Is a Group of Ants Called? · An Army of Ants · A Nest of Ants · A Swarm of Ants · A Bike of Ants · What Animals Form a Colony?

Leave a Comment