return to the nest. He had no chance at all of survival. A delicate creature, he was not provided with defenses. He had no way to find food, or feed himself if he stumbled across some. He had been issued a one-way ticket. He would die by dehydration, or crushed in the beak of a bird, or chopped into pieces by the jaws of an enemy ant, or, less quickly, pierced by the bloodsucking proboscis of an assassin bug.
To escape the same fate, the newly mated future Queen of the Trailhead Colony, full-brained and powerfully muscled, hurried to find shelter. She had to get back underground as quickly as possible after receiving her sperm load. First, however, she had to take a few minutes to shed her four wings. To do that she simply bent her middle legs forward, pressed them against the base of the wings, and snapped them off. This mutilation caused no injury to the rest of her body. It caused no pain. From the start the wings had been lifeless films and struts of chitin, joined to the body in a way that made them easy to break off painlessly and then discard.
The Queen was a parachutist that slipped her harness upon landing. Now she could move more quickly to avoid ants, spiders, and other predators hunting around her in the grassroots jungle. She was fortunate to come upon an open space between grass clumps, a small, ant-sized clearing at the Lake Nokobee trailhead. By luck she had found it an ideal site. If she could build a nest there, it would be her home for, perhaps, twenty years. She set out at once to dig a vertical tunnel in the sandy clay soil. Her movements were swift and precise, and within minutes she had deepened the shaft to more than her body length. It provided some degree of protection, but needed to be completed as quickly as possible. She had to hurry. Her life remained in constant danger; there was not a minute to lose.
At a predetermined depth, which she measured by the time it took her to climb up and down the shaft, the young Queen turned to the side at the bottom and began to excavate a wider space. She continued until she had fashioned a round chamber about three times wider than the vertical shaft. Her safety was now enhanced but far from ensured. Predators and marauding ants could still climb down the shaft to attack her. At least now the enemies would be confined to a narrow space by the walls of the shaft and forced to confront the young Queen's thrusting sting and snapping jaws head-on before they could reach her vulnerable body.
With this much achieved, and as the shadows of the surrounding pines lengthened across the trailhead, she had beaten odds of about a hundred to one. For every hundred young queens leaving the mother nest in order to be mated and start a new colony, only one at the end of the day now sat in the bottom chamber of an incipient nest.
Yet in spite of this huge achievement, and no matter how securely she had constructed her home, the odds against final success were still stacked against her. The chance of progressing from being the architect of a nearly excavated nest to being the mother of a large, mature colony was also about one in a hundred. Thus the Trailhead Queen would be statistically the single one in ten thousand who flew from the mother nest and went on to finish the entire process. She alone would enjoy a long life in the deep royal chamber of a mound nest. Defended by an army of fierce daughters, she would be as safe as any insect in the whole world could expect to be.
Even with the excavation of the first chamber complete, the Trailhead Queen still had heavy work ahead. First, she laid a small cluster of eggs on the earthen floor. These tiny objects she was compelled to lick continuously. It was an urgent task, because to the peril from enemies above was now added the threat of bacteria and fungi teeming in the soil all around her. If the eggs were not regularly cleaned and coated with antibiotic saliva, they would be soon overgrown by an invading mold and consumed. And from a single bacterium in the soil excavated by the Queen, millions could proliferate on any ant tissue left unprotected.
Other young queens around the Trailhead