Not a role to be relished. Each of these founding queen females produces a new group of worker ants which mature quite quickly to begin their job of feeding the queen and tending the queen's newly laid eggs and larvae. Ants themselves are spread throughout North America with colours ranging from black through brown to reddish. In general, ant queens lay their eggs continuously throughout the warmer seasons and the colonies hibernate in winter. Normally they spend winter below ground in the ant nest, hill or colony but there are a few species that apparently spend the winter in garden trash.
Ants eat organic matter, although a few are carnivorous eating anything they can drag down.
Many species feed on the honeydew secreted by aphids and may thus become a bit of a nuisance by herding and caring for aphid populations. An ant is a scavenger. If you find it inside your tree, it is not bringing disease to the tree. Neither is it eating or wrecking the tree. What it is doing is harvesting the rotten wood, fungus and other organisms that ARE eating the tree.