warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there in fact as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself.
The deception was the result of the way the bodies of insects decay after death. Where humans and other vertebrate animals have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue that quickly rots away, insects are encased in an external skeleton. Their soft tissues shrivel inwardly into dry threads and lumps, but their exoskeleton around them remains, a knight's armor fully intact long after the knight is gone.
Hence the workers were at first unaware of this mother's death. Her quietude said nothing, and the odors of her life, still rising from her, signaled, I remain among you.
She smelled alive.
The deception was made easier because in life she had never given orders or led them in activities of any kind--even though her brain was fully programmed to perform all of their tasks if she chose.
She was to all purposes a winged wasp who lived in a neutered wingless society. Yet the only initiatives she ever took were all in a burst at the beginning of her adult life--with approximately twenty years left to go--when she left the colony of her birth, abandoning along with it her mother and sisters. She mated then, once for all time--no more sex for her--and started a new colony of her own. Furiously, during a very short period of activity and alone, she performed almost all of the instinctive behaviors of a female of her species, and on top of that the same labor as sterile workers of a developed colony.
The hereditary programs were there, in the sense organs of the Trailhead Queen and in her nerve circuitry, all expressed in the required correct sequence of her actions. These programs faithfully repeated the routine followed by the ancestral wasps that evolved into the first social ants as they crawled among dinosaurs over a hundred million years ago.
Leaving the nest of her birth to start this process, she first spread her four membranous wings and flew into the air. There she joined a swarm of flying males and other virgin queens. One of the males was able to catch her. He clamped his legs around her body, and the couple spiraled down to the ground. On landing, he used large claspers at the rear end of his body to hold their genitalia together and complete the insemination. Within five minutes the act was finished, and the Queen shook the male loose. All of the sperm she received flowed up into a special bag-shaped organ in her abdomen to stay there until called on to fertilize more of her eggs. That might be years into the future. Each sperm was endowed with a potential life-span equal to her own.
In contrast, the father of all her children was programmed to die almost immediately after the mating. The only thing he had ever done was accept meals regurgitated to him like a nestling bird by his sisters, and wait, and wait some more, and finally take the one short flight from his home followed by five minutes of copulation.
The male had started his life as an egg laid by the Queen of the mother colony. The egg hatched into a grub-shaped larva, which was fed by the all-female nurses. Upon reaching full size, the larva metamorphosed into a pupa. This final immature stage was encased in a soft, waxy, temporary exoskeleton with the form of an adult and three body parts--head, thorax, and abdomen. A pair of antennae and three pairs of legs sprouted from the body. Inside, the masses of undifferentiated tissue, protected by the waxy outer skeleton, grew into his final internal organs.
When the transformation was complete, the outer layer was stripped away and eaten by the workers, and the adult male stepped out, complete with wings, large eyes, massive genitalia, rudimentary jaws, tiny brain, and the one big purpose programmed in his tiny brain followed by quick death.
In short, the male was no more than a guided missile loaded with sperm. His life's work would be a single ejaculation. Up to the climactic moment, he had been a parasite in his mother's colony, a layabout fed and groomed by his sisters. He performed no public service. After his world-defining five minutes, he was left with only one instruction that would be enforced if necessary by his sisters. Don't come back here. Just die.
He would not even try to