So, things happen to an ant colony.

The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like I expect to meet another forager every three seconds.

When we talk about bottom up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions.

So, the ant colony is a great model you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing.

When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony specific odor.

No ant directs the behavior of any other ant.

The first is that the experience of the ant of each ant can't be very predictable.

The ant isn't alone.

But what beekeepers can do is, if they have one surviving colony, they can split that colony in two.

Let's look at that ant.

What's in it for the ant?

This is a three year old colony.

Zimbabwe was once a colony of Britain.

Kenya used to be a British colony.

Some recent discoveries There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica there's a self directed robot scientist that's made a discovery soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years.

So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony.

And why was the ant doing it?

It's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony.

At one time Nigeria was a British colony.

Here from underneath is an ant foot, and when the claws don't dig in, that pad automatically comes out without the ant doing anything.

And I know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because I've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants.

There's an ant crawling up a vertical surface.

So there's nothing in it for the ant.

And it would change as the colony gets larger.

Some say that China was like a Russian colony.

One of the reasons I tell you about ants is because of my husband, who is in fact an ant taxonomist and when we got married, he promised to name an ant after me, which he did Procryptocerus nalini, a canopy ant.

So, an ant starts out somewhere near the queen.

It feels like I've landed in a colony of angels.

And then this is how colony size and numbers of worker ants changes so this is about 10,000 worker ants changes as a function of colony age, in years.

So this is the kind of rule that, as the colony develops and gets older and larger, will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one.

This process changes with colony age, and it changes like this.

I started with the 1607 Massachusetts Bay Colony Pequot Indian Wars.

Makes it a lot easier to put a colony up there.

Puerto Rico was no more a colony than Alaska and Hawaii.

A century later, Puerto Rico was still a United States colony.

And that lower photo, that's a bird colony that has been boomed.

So this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer.

What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of?

And so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health.

This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance.

So I want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony.

So this is a one year old colony this happens to be 536.

Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older.

And I thought, These ants, are they looking for the queen ant?

But I thought, perhaps the ant won't know, it'll probably move in.