Queen ant

The queen ant often can live for over a year which is considerably longer than the lives of the worker ants which only really last for a couple of months.

The queen ant lays all the eggs in the anthill.
The queen ant lives up to ten or twenty years.
Some ants sleep for seven hours a day.

A male and a female queen ant mate. The female is the larger ant
The queen grows to be an adult, mates with a male, then spends the rest of her life laying eggs.

“The first thing [any new queen ant] does,' said William Atherton DuPuy in Our Insect Friends and Foes, “is to tear off her wings, which she never expects to use again now that she had made her marriage flight.

Each colony has at least 1 queen ant. The queen lays eggs that the worker ants will guard and care for. Like honeybees, worker ants look for food, feed the young, and defent the colony against enemies.

At first the queen ant lays her eggs among tree leaves while the worker ants engage in building the nest. This emergent ant society helps in building the nest by weaving together living tree leaves.

Life Span
A colony will live ten to 15 years-as long as the single queen ant lives. Since the queen is the only reproductive individual in the colony, when she dies the colony begins to fade.

The male ants only serve one purpose, to mate with future queen ants and do not live very long. The queen grows to adulthood, mates, and then spends the rest of her life laying eggs.

See also: Ant, Formicidae, Honeybee, Termite, Beetle