What did the word ant first mean, and how does a desert ant measure its way home? These ant trivia questions fill five rounds, from the queen's wing stubs to the bullhorn acacia.
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Five rounds, from emmet to the ant mill
Names and family tree sorts ants from termites and velvet ants. Body and senses finds the petiole, the spiracles and three small eyes. Queens, workers and nests meets nanitics, repletes and a nest sewn with larval silk. Trails, travel and defense follows a pheromone line, a counted walk and a raft. Ants, plants and people ends with honeydew, rooibos and Aesop.
For a nature club or a picnic table
Each question shows four answers. Choose one to see whether it holds, why, and which article says so. Ten make a set; Scored round keeps the result quiet until question twenty.
Questions and answers
How long do ants live?
It depends on the caste. A queen may reach 30 years, a worker lives one to three years, and a male lasts only a few weeks.
Does every ant colony have one queen?
No. Some nests hold several queens, and some have no queen at all; a nest without one is called a gamergate colony.
Are termites a kind of ant?
No. Termites are sometimes called white ants, but the two are only distant relatives. Termites sit with the cockroaches in the order Blattodea; ants belong with wasps and bees in the Hymenoptera.
How were the answers checked?
Each was read on October 3, 2026 in the English Wikipedia article Ant, linked under every question. Species counts, biomass estimates, ants as food or medicine, the control of ants as pests and modern films and games are left out.
Ants share the order Hymenoptera with which insects?Answer: Wasps and bees. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
The family name Formicidae comes from the Latin word for ant. What is that word?Answer: Formica. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
From which insects did ants evolve?Answer: Wasps. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
The largest ant known is a fossil species. What is its name?Answer: Titanomyrma giganteum. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
The oldest fossils of ants date from the middle of which period?Answer: The Cretaceous. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Termites form the order Blattodea together with which insects?Answer: Cockroaches. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
To which family do all ants belong?Answer: Formicidae. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What are velvet ants?Answer: Wingless female wasps. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is the study of ants called?Answer: Myrmecology. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What was the original meaning of the word ant?Answer: The biter. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which archaic English word for an ant comes from the same Old English root?Answer: Emmet. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which fossil ant, trapped in amber, did E. O. Wilson and his colleagues identify in 1966?Answer: Sphecomyrma. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which insects are sometimes called white ants, though they are only distantly related to ants?Answer: Termites. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which of these large islands has no native ant species?Answer: Greenland. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Body and senses 17
Ants are easily told by their geniculate antennae. What does geniculate mean?Answer: Elbowed. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Ants have no lungs. Through which tiny valves do gases pass?Answer: Spiracles. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
How many small simple eyes, or ocelli, sit on top of an ant's head?Answer: Three. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
In the workers of many species, the sting is a modified form of which structure?Answer: The egg-laying organ. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
The metapleural gland is found only in ants. What do its secretions include?Answer: Chemicals with antibiotic properties. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Most ants fall within which ranges of color?Answer: Yellow to red or brown to black. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What are an ant's compound eyes good at detecting?Answer: Movement. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What are an ant's two strong jaws called?Answer: Mandibles. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What does each of an ant's legs end in?Answer: A hooked claw. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What does the infrabuccal chamber inside an ant's mouth do?Answer: Stores food to pass on to other ants. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is remarkable about the chromosomes of the Australian jack jumper ant?Answer: It has only a single pair. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is the node-like narrow waist of an ant called?Answer: The petiole. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What marks a queen ant after her nuptial flight?Answer: The stubs of her shed wings. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which ants in a colony have wings?Answer: Only queens and males. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which Australian ant has excellent vision and can judge the size of things moving nearly a meter away?Answer: The bulldog ant. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which long tube along the top of an ant's body works like a heart?Answer: The dorsal aorta. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which section of an ant carries both the wings and the legs?Answer: The mesosoma. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Queens, workers and nests 19
An ant's crop holds food to be shared. What is it also called?Answer: The social stomach. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Army ants build no permanent nest. What is the temporary nest they form from their own bodies called?Answer: A bivouac. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
For how long can a queen ant live?Answer: Up to 30 years. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
How does a new worker ant spend the first few days of her adult life?Answer: Caring for the queen and young. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
How long do male ants usually survive?Answer: Only a few weeks. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
In honeypot ants, what are repletes?Answer: Workers that serve as living food stores. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Weaver ants bind leaves into a nest with silk. Where does the silk come from?Answer: From their own larvae. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What are the fertile male ants of a colony called?Answer: Drones. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What are the first, smaller workers of a new colony called?Answer: Nanitics. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What do entomologists call the winged ants that leave the nest on a nuptial flight?Answer: Alates. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What does an unfertilized ant egg become?Answer: A male. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is a polydomous ant colony?Answer: One spread over several separate nests. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is the formal term for a worker ant?Answer: An ergate. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is trophallaxis?Answer: Feeding another ant with regurgitated liquid food. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which describes the workers of a typical ant colony?Answer: Sterile, wingless females. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which stage comes between larva and adult in an ant's life?Answer: The pupa. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Why are ant colonies described as superorganisms?Answer: The ants appear to act as one unified entity. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Why do workers move larvae and pupae from one brood chamber to another?Answer: To keep them at a fairly constant temperature. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Why does freshly fallen rain help a young queen after her flight?Answer: It softens the ground for digging a nest. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Trails, travel and defense 18
Among leafcutter ants, which workers cut the stalks?Answer: The largest. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
An ant of Australian mangrove swamps lives in nests that go under water. How does it breathe there?Answer: From trapped pockets of air. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Besides catching prey, how have trap-jaw ants been seen to use their snapping jaws?Answer: To fling themselves backward out of danger. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Formicine ants secrete a poison made mainly of which acid?Answer: Formic acid. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
How do ants tell a nest-mate from a stranger?Answer: By scent. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
How do some ant species survive floods?Answer: By forming floating rafts. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
How does the Sahara desert ant measure how far it has walked?Answer: By counting its steps. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What can gliding ants do when they fall from the forest canopy?Answer: Steer back to a tree trunk. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What do desert ants of the genus Cataglyphis use to measure direction?Answer: The position of the sun. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What do foraging ants leave on the ground for other ants to follow?Answer: Pheromone trails. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What do the propaganda pheromones of several ant species do?Answer: Make enemy ants fight among themselves. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What does a crushed ant give off that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy?Answer: An alarm pheromone. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is an ant mill?Answer: A circle of army ants that keep following one another. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is it called when an ant makes sound with its gaster segments and mandibles?Answer: Stridulation. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is tandem running in ants?Answer: One ant leading a nest-mate to newly found food. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is thanatosis, seen in a few species of ant?Answer: Feigning death. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which ants of Central and South America are considered to have the most painful sting of any insect?Answer: Bullet ants. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which job do worker ants do in necrophoresis?Answer: Removing dead nest-mates. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Ants, plants and people 18
A parasite turns the black rear of a canopy ant red. What do birds then mistake it for?Answer: Ripe fruit. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
The eggs of which insects carry an edible knob, so that ants take them into the nest?Answer: Stick insects. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Growers in southern China have long used weaver ants to protect which crop?Answer: Citrus. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
In Greek mythology, which goddess turned the maiden Myrmex into an ant?Answer: Athena. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
In South Africa, ants help people gather the seeds of which plant, used for a herbal tea?Answer: Rooibos. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
In which book of 1880 did Mark Twain write about ants?Answer: A Tramp Abroad. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
In which fable of Aesop does an ant stand for hard work?Answer: The Ant and the Grasshopper. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Some South American poison dart frogs feed mainly on ants. What do some of them get from the ants?Answer: The toxins in their skin. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What are elaiosomes?Answer: Structures on seeds that ants seek as food. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What do ants do at night with the caterpillars of some blue butterflies that they tend?Answer: Bring them inside the nest. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What do ants do for the aphids they tend?Answer: Keep predators away and move them to new feeding spots. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is a formicarium?Answer: An enclosure for keeping and studying an ant colony. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is anting?Answer: A bird putting ants on its feathers or resting on an ant nest. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is myrmecochory?Answer: The dispersal of seeds by ants. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
What is the sweet liquid that aphids give off and many ants collect?Answer: Honeydew. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which ants make devil's gardens by killing the plants around their host trees?Answer: Lemon ants. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Which tree of Central America houses colonies of stinging ants in its hollow thorns?Answer: The bullhorn acacia. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
Who first discovered ultraviolet vision in ants, in 1881?Answer: Sir John Lubbock. Source: Wikipedia: Ant
How this list was compiled
Written for this site; nothing was copied from another list. Questions and wrong choices are our own. Each explanation restates, in our own sentences, a fact from the English Wikipedia article named and linked beside the question (https://en.wikipedia.org, text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license): Ant. On October 3, 2026 the passage that states each fact was read in that article before the question was kept. Left out on purpose: counts of species and of ants alive, biomass estimates, ants as food or medicine, the control of ants as pests, mating, stings as a danger to people, the passages on living faiths, and modern books, films and games. Levels are our estimate: easy is fair for any table, medium suits people who know the animal, hard will stump most tables. Unofficial, and not advice on keeping, feeding or approaching an animal. Licence: own work