Ants

Ants are no doubt the most successful of all the social insects of the HYMENOPTERA, an order that also includes the social WASPS and BEES. Ants are colony makers and have inhabited the warmer environments of the Earth for at least 100 million years. Their numbers are prodigious: it has been estimated that at any one time there are at least 1 quadrillion living ants on the Earth--a number so large that it is almost meaningless. These individuals are members of some 5,000, or perhaps as many as 10,000, species.