ants (Page 3)

Bees use visual cues to find flowers with nectar and do a “bee dance” back at the hive to tell the others where to find them too. Once ants find a good source of food, they also return to the nest to tell others about it, but scientists have always wondered how ants, who often navigate in the dark, are able to find their way back home from their food hunting expeditions. It turns out they count their steps.
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A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching over 3,000 miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain. It’s the largest group of ants ever recorded, according to Swiss, French and Danish scientists. The colony consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests, and they all cooperate with one another.

Normally, ants from different nests fight with each other. But the researchers think the ants in the supercolony are all close enough genetically to recognize one another as part of the same family, despite being from different nests with different queens.
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