The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 5.0 by Chris Reilley and Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary. At least 8,000 different species of ants can be found everywhere on Earth except the North and South Poles. Ants preserved in amber suggest that these insects existed 50 million years before humans.
Queen ants establish new communities, or nests, after their mating flight.
On this flight the queen mates with several males. After mating, the males fall to Earth and die. In some species of red ant, the queen snaps the male in half after mating with him. The queen then finds an uninhabited nest, settles into it, and pulls her wings off. She will never fly again, and after removing her wings she is able to absorb the wing muscles as nutrients for her eggs.