All ants came from one mother. When the queen lays eggs, her daughters, the worker ants, care for them with utmost devotion and pass down the same genes to the next generation. When a parasitic ant ...

Experts discovered an unusual form of regicide in which a parasitic ant queen tricks workers in a colony into turning on their own mother. By Rebecca Dzombak Rebecca Dzombak previously reported on ...

This story appears in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine. It’s good to be the queen—the ant queen, that is—because mating does wonders for her immune system. When exposure to a low ...