Gosh this thread started off being about Atheism?

It will be a atheist scientist who will invent the hyperdrive that goes warp 9 speeds to other universes

Yes I think the most common scenario to occur is you have the female worker ants. They are ALL female and they have jobs like defense of the colony, foraging around for food, and taking care of the brood. One of those females will become the queen and she is fertilized by a male ant. She has wings also and is the only ant that is capable of actually laying the eggs. Male ants die after mating. Their societies are purely communist in structure therefore it is assumed they are also Atheists.

Of course it will be an atheist scientist to invent that. . .

The christian ones will be trying to prove that snakes talk. . .

too funny again. love it

Not unless they devise a more practical fuel source than the "delithium crystals."

I know my ants are not athiests. You know, the ones who are bringing up ant gravel for use in my driveway. They worship me as their goddesss. I feed them and they toil away bringing me ant gravel.

I am their god and goddess.

I don't know about ants, but I used to keep bees and they will create a new queen if the old one dies.

They do this soley by what they feed the new born ant. If they feed it 'Royal Jelly' it will become a queen.

I think the drones also become males based on the way they are fed during development. In fact I think it's also dependent upon the size of the cell that the egg is placed in.

Quite interesting that the very size you have to grow in could affect what you become.

This is actually true of some fish too. They will develop quite differently in a small aquarium than they will when they are grown in a large pond for example. It doesn't matter how much you feed them. They will remain smaller in a smaller tank.

Of course, this isn't true of all fish. Some fish will quickly outgrow a tank that is too small for them. But others species are much more sensitive to their environment.

There is so much interesting stuff going on in the world around us. We could live and study for millennia and not even scratch the surface.

Not to mention the fact that even during that time new speicies, behaviors, and conditions would have evolved. We could potentially live forever and never keep up with discovering the changes in evolution.

Gee, I'm jealous.

I want to be worshiped too!

Oh my! I guess I believe in a jealous God after all!

Oh no maybe Im confusing ants and bees. James how is an ant queen made? The same manner in which a bee queen is made? I always thought the female worker ants pick out one female ant to be queen and then a male fertilizes her and she becomes a new queen. I dont know. Now Im confused. Its not like you can ask them. You can buy queen ants for your farms I know that much. So they have to be made of course.

Find yourself a good ant pile. They are not very active in the winter. That's the best time to collect the gravel. A few will come up top to see what is going on and maybe they will alert the others.

I told them to get to work, I need more gravel.

I need to expand my kingdom and find some more ant hills.

One measly ant hill only provides one bucket at a time. I have a large driveway.

I have always heard that if you want to build an ant farm you with a queen, you have to find the queen. They can't make a queen. Bees can but not ants I think.

Well how would they do it in the wild then in their colonies? They cant order a queen on the internet.

I'm not sure how its done. But it happens a certain time of the year. That is when you see flying ants, drones and queens. They all fight for the right to mate. Then the surviving queen go off and start a new colony laying a bunch of eggs.

Yeah but a queen would need to be made in some manner. She is the only one that can lay the eggs unless Im thinking of bees again.

I know it started out as joke about my ants and using their gravel for my driveway, but I decided to really try it. The gravel is slightly larger than the sand I have there right now that was brought in and dumped. It keeps my driveway from being muddy when it rains.

Today I got a bucket of the gravel and spread it on my driveway. Some of the sand needs to be replaced. Who knows, maybe little by little, I will have enough. There are many ant hills out in the prairie too. I could go out looking for some more.

Just think when it is done, I can say that the gravel in my driveway is all provided by my ants.

Well I guess we can google the information. Anything you want to know you can find on google. It has never failed me.

How queens make queens

A queen carpenter ant with her brood [Jim Kalisch, University of Nebraska, Entomology Department]Q: What causes a queen ant to lay queen eggs instead of worker eggs? How does she make queens, kings, and workers? — Shirley, Sequim, Washington

A queen carpenter ant with her brood [Jim Kalisch, University of Nebraska, Entomology Department]

A: A queen controls egg sex and ant caste (queen, king, or worker) mostly through a clever use of sperm. She acquires a bag of sperm that lasts her lifetime (10 to 30 years) when she swarms as a young ant. She selects suitable partners and mates with several males so her sperm bank has good genetic material.

A queen controls an egg’s sex by fertilizing or not fertilizing the eggs. Females come from fertilized eggs and males from unfertilized eggs. The males can mate and therefore are kings, for a few short days.

Females come in two types: sterile workers and fertile queens. A queen controls which female type emerges through the genes she passes along. Actually, she doesn’t have absolute control over this process and can’t or sterile workers would cease to exist in a few generations.

Any sterile caste whose genes invariably caused sterility could not be passed on and, therefore, those genes would quickly be eliminated from the population. Thus, the genes for sterility are expressed conditionally — they may or may not cause a female to be sterile. Genes don’t dictate what happens. Instead, genes have to be turned on and, in the case of queen ants, food plays a big role.

The environment of the larva decides which way the genes get expressed and whether or not the female becomes fertile. When she gets enough food (or perhaps some other physiological trigger), the larva increases hormone levels and this starts sex-organ development for the adult. A queen emerges.

By the way, the genes of the father ant determine whether a worker becomes a small worker or one large enough (twice the small worker size) to be a warrior or heavy-duty worker.

I think its similar to bees. I found this.

"A queen ant is an adult, mated female ant in an ant colony; generally the mother of all the other ants in that colony. They develop from larvae specially fed in order to become sexually mature. Depending on the species, there can be either a single mother queen, or potentially hundreds of fertile queens in some invasive species."

Well, let's face it. Neither you nor JB are atheists. You both believe in Antheism.