It could be anti bacterial.

But it's not bacterial pneumonia.

This is the bacterial Esperanto.

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

This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell.

This is a three year old colony.

So, things happen to an ant colony.

Zimbabwe was once a colony of Britain.

Kenya used to be a British colony.

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

It's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony.

At one time Nigeria was a British colony.

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.

And it would change as the colony gets larger.

Some say that China was like a Russian colony.

So, 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells on a human being.

United Nations inspectors found no evidence that Iraq produced dry bacterial warfare agents.

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 along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria, streptococcus and boom, they get a bacterial pneumonia.

So our team developed new techniques for actually growing, cloning entire bacterial chromosomes in yeast.

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.

From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences.

So, we pushed the piles down through the dune, and we create an initial bacterial surface.

They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA.

Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

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.

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.

But there's a big difference, which is that it only happens within the colony.

So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants.

Remember you have these 10 times or more bacterial cells in you or on you, keeping you healthy.

We're not killing the colony we're taking a small core sample out of the top.

And so far in the H5N1 cases in people, similarly bacterial infection has not been an issue at all.

Decades later, it turned out that the source of their blindness was most likely some sort of bacterial infection.