their stings to cripple or kill her, or else spray her with a poisonous secretion. And they eat any eggs she manages to lay. Only when the Queen dies is the taboo lifted--and then only for a few individuals.
When the taboo ended in the Trailheader nest, a second crisis arose. The candidate royals began to quarrel among themselves for control. They converged on the brood chambers and jostled for position there. They struggled to climb on top of their rivals. Winners in these encounters seized their opponents' legs and antennae and dragged them away from the brood chambers. Unlike the thousands of their ordinary nestmates, they recognized one another as individuals. In time a dominance hierarchy formed, similar to pecking orders among chickens and rank orders among wolves. The Trailheader female who emerged as the alpha contender, in other words was able to chase away all her rivals, won the reproductive role. Egg-laying and larval growth resumed in a reduced but orderly manner. The crisis had ended by combat.
If the Trailhead Colony could not understand the history of its own species, how much did it know of its current condition? How could it make the right decision for survival? In fact, the Trailhead Colony knew a great deal. Worker ants are far more than just automated specks running around on the ground. Even with a brain only a millionth as big as that of a human, an ant can learn a simple maze half as fast as a laboratory rat, and remember the directions to as many as five different destinations when she forages away from the nest. After exploring a new terrain, a worker can integrate all the seemingly haphazard twists and loops she made and, amazingly, return to the nest in a straight line. She can learn and recall the special odor of the colony to which she belongs. In some species, she can recognize her own personal smell in odor trails over the ground to which she has contributed her own pheromones.
The Trailhead Colony, when all the learning and thought of its workers came together, was very smart by insect standards. With the unifying power of its Queen taken away and its population growth plummeting, it needed to act with all its group intelligence to regain its balance.
When one of the soldier-queens dominated its rivals and became the new Queen, the recovery of the colony seemed to get under way. A stream of eggs were laid. Larvae began to fill the empty brood chambers. Their odor and hunger signals joined with the pheromones of the new Soldier-Queen and spread through the nest. The power was returning. The workers found new energies. More foragers took the field.
One of the ants that led the way in restoring order was an elite worker that had served in the Queen's entourage during the final days. About ten percent of the worker force deserved this status, which they kept all their lives. All achieved it by labor; none belonged to the soldier caste, which was specialized for combat and called into action only when the colony was threatened. The elites were nervous and vigorous in movement. They initiated more tasks. They worked harder and more persistently, and they usually stayed on the job until it was finished. Other colony members were stirred to join them at the tasks they began. They were not just statistically at the upper end of the activity curve. They were a distinct group all on their own, forming a bump on the high end of the curve, and important to even a temporary prolonging of the life of the colony.
This particular elite worker was typical of her class in initiative and energy. After leaving the dead Queen, she proceeded directly to the nest entrance in search of new duties. Food was low, and fewer ordinary workers, grown lethargic, were leaving in search of new supplies. The defense of the colony had been weakened by the thinning of the sentinel force spread around the nest perimeter. Sensing the negligence of its nestmates, the elite left on solitary patrols, circling first close to the nest, then farther and farther away.
The renewed activity, led by the elites, was short-lived, however. The colony was destined to die, doomed by a hereditary trait even more basic than the altruism of the workers and the pheromonal ties that bound them together. The trait is the following. The Trailheaders, along with all ants of all kinds that ever existed back to the birth of