I believe ants and honey bees have genetically-coded and baked-in specializations like worker and queen bees

        • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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          17 days ago

          Under normal circumstances, a colony would be the place where the ant population lives, the number of queens just has to be equal or greater than 1, as they can have multiple in a single place.

          This supercolony is, from what I understood, a huge quantity of colonies that are interconnected, so you could trek from Portugal to Italy entirely within its tunnels, kinda like a state or country connected by roads

    • Sturgist@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      I got distracted and forgot to look it up…thanks ADHD…

      In 2000, an enormous supercolony of Argentine ants was found in Southern Europe (report published in 2002).[15] Of 33 ant populations tested along the 6,004-kilometre (3,731 mi) stretch along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in Southern Europe, 30 belonged to one supercolony with estimated millions of nests and billions of workers, interspersed with three populations of another supercolony.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony

      Blurb is under the “super colony” subsection.