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50 free Ants trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Ants farm fungus, stitch wounds, build supercolonies that span continents and snap their jaws shut at 230 km/h. A single queen can live thirty years; a crushed worker can trigger a riot with one chemical signal. This trivia about ants covers anatomy, colony life, famous species from leafcutters to bullet ants, and the people who made them a science. Every answer is sourced and explained, so the quiz works for classrooms, bug lovers and pub nights alike.
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Q 01Ants belong to the family Formicidae within which insect order?
Hymenoptera
That puts them alongside wasps and bees. Ants evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors during the Cretaceous period.
Q 02Roughly how many ant species have been described, out of an estimated 22,000?
13,800
Ants are identified by their elbowed antennae and the node-like waist formed by a constricted abdominal segment.
Q 03Which continent has no indigenous ants at all?
Antarctica
Only a few remote islands such as Greenland, Iceland and Hawaii also lack native ants. In tropical forests ants may outweigh all wild birds and mammals combined.
Q 04The original West Germanic meaning of the word ant was what?
The biter
The archaic English word emmet shares the same root. The family name Formicidae comes from the Latin formica.
Q 05The scientific study of ants is called what?
Myrmecology
The word comes from the Greek myrmex. It was coined by William Morton Wheeler, who also described honeypot ants in 1908.
Q 06Which ants are the only members of a colony that lay eggs?
Gynes
Gyne is the formal term for a queen. Over a lifetime one can lay thousands or even millions of eggs; some reproduce without mating.
Q 07Ant queens can live for up to how long?
30 years
Workers last one to three years and males only a few weeks. Queens live about 100 times longer than solitary insects of similar size.
Q 08Hermann Appel kept a Lasius niger queen alive in captivity for nearly how long?
29 years
A Pogonomyrmex owyheei queen in the field has an estimated maximum lifespan of thirty years.
Q 09Which members of an ant colony have wings?
Only queens and males
Queens shed theirs after the nuptial flight, leaving visible stubs. The six legs end in hooked claws for climbing.
Q 10A fertilised ant egg develops into which kind of offspring?
A diploid female
Unfertilised eggs become haploid males. Ants then go through complete metamorphosis, with a pupal stage before adulthood.
Q 11Ants range in body length from 0.75 millimetres up to about how long?
52 mm
The biggest ever was the fossil Titanomyrma giganteum, whose queen was 6 cm long with a 15 cm wingspan.
Q 12In 1966 E. O. Wilson's team identified an ant fossil in amber dating back roughly how far?
92 million years
The Cretaceous ant, Sphecomyrma, had some wasp-like features not found in modern ants. The oldest ant fossils are around 113 to 100 million years old.
Q 13Termites are sometimes called white ants, but they are actually related to which insects?
Cockroaches
Together they form the order Blattodea. Like ants they are eusocial with sterile workers, but they do not undergo complete metamorphosis.
Q 21Siafu, the name for African driver ants, is a loanword from which language?
Swahili
The genus Dorylus forms temporary underground bivouacs that it may occupy for a few days or up to three months.
Q 22In parts of Africa and South America, large ants are used in medicine as substitutes for what?
Surgical sutures
The ant grips the wound edges in its mandibles and locks in place; the body is then cut off, leaving the head as a clamp.
Q 23Fire ants belong to which genus of stinging ants?
Solenopsis
The genus holds over 200 species. Many red ants that get the name are not in it at all, including Myrmica rubra.
Q 14What does a crushed ant release that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy?
An alarm pheromone
Some species even deploy propaganda pheromones to confuse enemy ants and make them fight each other.
Q 15Leafcutter ants carry leaves home in order to do what with them?
Farm fungus
Next to humans, they form some of the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth, with nests holding millions of individuals.
Q 16A leafcutter ant can carry up to how many multiples of its own body weight?
50
They are native to South and Central America, Mexico and the southern United States, and belong to the genera Atta, Acromyrmex and Amoimyrmex.
Q 17The central mound of a leafcutter nest can grow to more than how wide in a few years?
30 metres
Smaller radiating mounds extend out to a radius of 80 metres, and the whole complex can house 3.55 million ants.
Q 18In ant-fungus farming, the nutrient-rich swollen tips the fungus grows for ants are called what?
Gongylidia
The growths are rich in lipids and carbohydrates. Farming of this kind is thought to have evolved in ants only twice.
Q 19Unlike most ants, army ants are notable for not building what?
Permanent nests
A colony moves almost constantly, forming temporary bivouacs. The behaviour evolved independently in several lineages, a case of convergent evolution.
Q 20Army ant workers are usually blind or have compound eyes reduced to what?
A single lens
Soldiers are larger with bigger mandibles and carry the heaviest prey back to the bivouac. Winged males can resemble wasps.
Q 24The red imported fire ant first reached the United States through which seaport?
Mobile, Alabama
It arrived by cargo ship between 1933 and 1945 with an estimated 9 to 20 unrelated queens, and was first observed in 1942.
Q 25The bullet ant's Venezuelan nickname, hormiga veinticuatro, refers to what?
24 hours of pain after a sting
Paraponera clavata lives in humid lowland rainforests of Central and South America and is named for a sting that feels like being shot.
Q 26On Justin Schmidt's sting pain index, the bullet ant ranks how?
Highest of all insect stings
Schmidt likened it to walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail in your heel. It scores 4.0 plus on his scale.
Q 27The Satere-Mawe people of Brazil weave bullet ants into what for warrior initiation rites?
Gloves
About 80 sedated ants are woven in with stingers facing inward. When they wake, the initiate must endure the stings.
Q 28Weaver ants build their nests by binding leaves together using what?
Larval silk
Workers hold larvae like glue guns. Colonies can span a hundred nests across many trees with more than half a million workers.
Q 29Introduced Argentine ant colonies on separate continents have been shown to form what?
A single global supercolony
Native to the Parana River lowlands, the species has spread to Mediterranean climates worldwide, from South Africa to Japan to California.
Q 30Carpenter ants chew galleries in timber, but unlike termites they do not do what?
Eat the wood
They discard sawdust-like debris outside the nest. Camponotus is the most species-rich ant genus, with over 1,500 described species.