The metronomic pumping out of fertilized eggs from her twenty ovaries was the heartbeat of the colony. That it should continue strong and true was the ultimate purpose of all the workers' labor. Their careful construction of the nest labyrinth, their readiness to risk life in daily searches for food abroad, their suicidal defense of the nest entrance, all their sacrifices were for her and for the creation of more altruistic workers like themselves.
One worker, or a thousand workers, could die and the colony would go on, repairing itself as needed. But the failure of the Queen, if not corrected, would be fatal.
Now after twenty more years that catastrophe had occurred. The death of the Queen was the greatest challenge the colony had faced since the days of its founding. Yet the workers could not take action until they learned for certain that the Queen was dead. They knew that something was not right, that something unnamed had settled upon them, but they did not yet realize the extent of her problem. The signs were not yet strong enough. So the Trailhead Colony thrummed on for a while longer with bustle and precision. Like a large ship at sea, it could not be easily turned from the shoals coming at it.
The reason for the continued momentum of the Trailhead Colony lay in the way ants communicate. Because they live most of their lives in underground darkness, they cannot speak to each other with sight or sound. Instead, they are forced to communicate with chemical signals. Human beings think in sound and vision. Ants, forced to be pheromonal, think only in taste and smell. No human can understand the chemical sensations that crowd the brain of a worker ant. We have no understanding of the entities she conceives, or the tones, the accounts, and the blends that course through her mind. While the Trailhead Colony may have been silent to unaided human perception, it was thunderous with pheromonal chatter among the ants.
The Trailhead Colony communicated using about a dozen chemical signals. The retinue of workers crowded around their dead mother were locked to her by several of these pheromones still oozing from her body. Translated into a human voice, they whispered a ghostly command: Come here, gather around me, stay close to me.
The attendants licked her body lasciviously with their pad-shaped tongues. They continued eagerly to clean her, picking up substances from her to pass on to others outside the retinue. The pheromones that triggered their intimate care spoke through taste and smell: Wash me, eat the substances you clean from my body, share them with your sisters.
The substances commanding the retinue were held in the forward chamber of the gut of each of the ants. They mingled there with liquid food. The ants smelled each other constantly by sweeps of their antennae, the "feelers" on their heads, the equivalent of the human nose. An ant that was well fed, with lots of food resting in her gut, said to a less well-fed nestmate, Smell this, and if you are hungry, eat. If the ant approached and was in fact hungry, she extended her tongue, and the donor ant rewarded her by regurgitating liquid directly into her mouth.
The exchanges among the sisters continued in this way. The combined intelligence of the colony listened to the flood of crosstalk among its members. They spoke in pheromones in all the messages they were programmed to send and receive. The colony exchanged information within itself in the same way the body of one ant, one human, or any other single organism exchanges information within itself by hormones. The superorganism pheromones suggested, begged, and commanded.
Outside the nest, not far from the Trailheader mound, a wood thrush flew by one day carrying a grasshopper to her own nest. Part of the crushed insect broke off and fell to the ground. In less than a minute a patrolling worker found it, triggering a chain of action of the kind followed countless times by Trailheaders before. She examined the grasshopper, tasted it briefly, and ran back to the nest entrance. On the way, she touched the tip of her abdomen to the ground, laying down a thin trail of chemicals. Entering the nest, she rushed up to each nestmate she passed, brushing her face close to theirs. The odor-sensitive antennae of the nestmates detected both the trail substance and the smell of grasshopper. The signals now proclaimed, Food, food. I have found food, follow my trail!