Imagine trying to build a house without a blueprint, find a shortcut through an unfamiliar city without a map, or govern a large organisation with no leaders and no meetings.

It sounds impossible. Yet tiny-brained ants, working without leaders or blueprints, have been solving problems like these for millions of years – and no, the queen isn’t the boss telling them what to do.

By almost any measure, ants are a wildly successful group of animals – there’s an estimated 20 quadrillion of them on Earth and they thrive on every continent but Antarctica.

How have these minuscule animals managed to take over the world (and our kitchens)? The answer is teamwork.

Ants are social animals that live in colonies ranging from a few individuals to vast continent-spanning supercolonies containing billions of ants.

Bustling ant colonies display many of the features we associate with human societies, including:

transportation networks

collective care of the young

food systems (including agriculture in some species)

health care for injured nestmates.

In humans, this level of social complexity usually involves clear governance hierarchies, with leaders and middle managers directing our activities.

But ants don’t work that way. So who is in charge in an ant colony?

The answer is simple: no one.

The queen........

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